As a GP I by no means thought I’d fall for a rip-off. But crypto conmen duped me out of £200,000 – and now my spouse needs a divorce

This time last year I found myself in a financial bind. I’m 65 and work as a GP in Manchester. I’d had an unexpectedly high tax bill of £30,000 and my wife and I also wanted to fix the roof and convert the attic.

So I chatted to a few friends who had made money from cryptocurrency trading, specifically from what they called ‘crypto arbitrage’.

I learnt that this is a kind of futures trading, where a trader buys crypto coins from one cryptocurrency exchange on the understanding they will sell them at a higher price on another exchange. Friends warned me that it was not something to try to do myself but to find an investor to do for me.

I looked up ‘crypto arbitrage investors’ online and came across what appeared to be an article on the BBC website. It was talking about the Radio 2 DJ Sara Cox and how she had made a lot of money through a particular investment company.

I looked it up online and found Wiseway Investments, a Dubai-based company which specialises in crypto arbitrage, boasting average returns of 20 to 25 per cent for investors. 

It also said it was registered with the UK financial watchdog the Financial Conduct Authority and protected under the Financial Services Compensation Scheme.

Scammed: A doctor turned to risky cryptocurrency investing in a bid to make some quick cash with tragic results

Both are regulatory bodies – the first protects consumers and the second pays compensation when firms fail – so in my mind, it was official.

I thought I’d give crypto arbitrage a go and filled out a contact form online, including my telephone number. 

Within hours, a man with an American accent, Ethan, called me and explained how crypto arbitrage worked. It sounded the same as I’d already gleaned from friends so I agreed with him that I’d start with a £200 investment.

Ethan set me up an investor account which I would be able to access via the Wiseway Investments website.

While we were talking I transferred £200 into cryptocurrency on my phone – an option available through my bank Revolut – and then transferred the crypto into my wallet (or account).

While we were talking I could see the crypto land in my investment account. Ethan explained I could log on and see how my crypto was trading whenever I wanted. A day later that £200 turned into £300.

Just to be sure all was as it seemed, I put in a withdrawal claim – which Ethan talked me through over WhatsApp – and took out £100 profit. 

The money landed in my Revolut account, so all seemed legitimate. I put in another £1,000 and within two or three days, my balance was about £15,000, which was incredible.

Ethan would often text, asking me to call him via WhatsApp when I had a break, but mostly we would speak in the evenings, chatting three or four hours a week about the crypto market. Ethan was my main contact.

There was also a man called Oscar who updated me. One day I had a call from a man at the firm I’d never spoken to before called Jason, and he recommended that I buy the crypto coin Ethereum. I decided to go for it and transferred £5,000 into crypto via my Revolut account then into my wallet on the website.

Jason rang again a week later and recommended another coin – Solana – so I dipped into my Isas and gave them a little bit more for that. And then somebody else called Helen from Wiseway Investments called to say Nvidia stocks were doing well… on and on it went. 

Each time I transferred cash from my Revolut account into my cryptocurrency account through an online banking transfer. I was transferring so much that Revolut delayed payments. 

Every time I tried to transfer to crypto I was given a warning that this could be a scam and was asked to answer questions about what the transfer was for.

Ethan had told me to say that I was paying for a service and told me that the banks were issuing warnings as they were worried crypto companies were taking business from them. It made sense, so I always proceeded.

Risk: Crypto arbitrage is where a trader buys crypto coins from one cryptocurrency exchange on the understanding they will sell them at a higher price on another exchange

I was building what I thought was a strong portfolio which included shares as well as crypto.

I’d invested £30,000, taking money from my pension and my savings and my account showed the value of my investments was £57,000. That’s what I needed to cover my expenses so I told Ethan I wanted to take my money out. I’d been investing for just over three months.

That was when things started to become strange.

Ethan said I had to pay 10 per cent of what I held in my account to get the money out as an admin fee.

But by the time I’d paid £6,000 the value of my stocks had gone up, so he told me I needed to give them another £1,000. This happened at least three more times.

By now I was getting annoyed. Doubts were starting to creep in, but I had so much invested I didn’t want to face the reality that it might all have been a lie.

I told Ethan outright: ‘I’m fed-up with this and want to close my account.’

He told me that to do that I had to pay an admin fee of £1,500. Again, I paid. Then I was told I had to pay tax – £2,000 – on my profit. That allayed my fears.

I thought if Wiseway was sorting out tax, then this had to be a reputable firm. So I paid that, and asked them to send a tax receipt for my tax return. That was on a Friday. The tax receipt hadn’t arrived by Monday. That was the first time I felt really anxious.

I phoned up and started getting cross with the person who answered. It wasn’t anyone I’d spoken to before. 

He told me they had closed my account and that I should have received the money which they had made into my Revolut account. I hadn’t, so he told me to wait a couple of days.

I was even sent a document that seemed to show the firm had sent a money transfer. I told myself not to worry, this was just a delay. 

This went on for two weeks, taking us well into August. But by now I was scared. I spoke to a manager, who told me he would transfer my money into cryptocurrency, instead of a standard bank account – blaming my bank for not putting it through in sterling.

Ethan said I would need to send a ‘mirror payment’ of 10 per cent into a bitcoin wallet to get my cash. That was £15,000 and it took me two or three days to pay that through Revolut.

By this time, Revolut was not letting me send large amounts of money, so I had to send it in two separate payments. By now they said my account was worth £250,000, and this chap called Alex told me he would send it to me if I gave him a big tip.

He said ‘this is the sort of thing I would do for $10,000’, so I said ‘look, if I get that money out you can have $10,000, but I’m not paying that until it’s in my account.’ 

They said I could withdraw it if I paid 10 per cent – about £25,000 – but Revolut would not let me send any more money, and neither would Kroo, my other online bank. 

I was able to send two payments of £10,000 via another account I had, with Monzo, but they blocked the third payment, which the scammers said had risen to another £10,000 because of a rise in the value of Bitcoin.

They told me that my investment was now meant to be worth £400,000. I yelled that I didn’t have another £40,000 to give them and demanded my money back.

By the end of that week, in September, nothing had come. I had to face the awful fact: I had been scammed. It was hard to take in. 

They had been so persuasive. I was desolate and it made me question my whole existence. I have always been a trusting person; this utterly destroyed my faith in humanity.

The next day the Wiseway Investments website vanished and nobody responded to my WhatsApp calls and messages. The single tick on messages showed that they were not being received. By now I was down £140,000, having cashed out investment accounts and Isas and dipped into my pension.

I felt sick with shock and shame. How could I have been so stupid?

You could ask why I hadn’t used these savings to pay for my tax in the first place – but I thought that investing was the smart thing to do, to help me grow my money.

I had not told my wife about any of it. I didn’t want her to worry that I didn’t have enough to support us. We’d been married 30 years and we had three wonderful children together but now they’d moved out to university we had grown apart and I spent long hours at the surgery. 

I had hoped the investments would cover the bills and Mary would never have known we were short on money.

When I realised I’d been scammed, I picked up the phone and reported it to Revolut.

I knew I had to tell Mary. Her reaction was worse than I’d feared. She went nuclear and it was World War Three. I told her why I’d started investing, but she accused me of getting involved with crypto because I was greedy. She said she could never forgive me.

It was a horrendous time. I went to my own doctor and was put on antidepressants. I was using alcohol to self-medicate. I thought about suicide. And this is when my story goes from bad to worse.

I can’t excuse what happened next other than to say I was at my most vulnerable and desperate to do something, anything, to claw back some of my losses.

Ruthless: The scammers left their victim financially ruined, facing divorce, homelessness and having to extend his retirement by may years 

I received a phone call at the beginning of November from a nice woman called Jane who had an Eastern European accent but said she lived in the UK. Good news, she told me: ‘We have managed to recover your money.’

We chatted and she told me I needed to give her 10 per cent to recover the funds. Of course it should have rung alarm bells but I was deaf to any warning signs. At this point I didn’t have any bank accounts that would let me transfer money to crypto.

Since I had reported the fraud, my bank accounts had been frozen. Jane told me I could send money directly to her and she would transfer it to crypto for me – as the bank, she said, was not letting me receive cash in sterling. 

She persuaded me to download something called Any Desk which allowed her access – and control – of my bank accounts, so that she could check it was all working fine. It’s one of the biggest regrets of my life. All was well until I checked my accounts a day later and every last penny was gone.

I had lost another £50,000. I felt like a complete failure. I had let my family down, and the one thing I did to try to make it better had made matters worse. I didn’t dare tell Mary about this second fraud.

By the end of November I’d lost a total of £200,000.

In December, Mary wanted to go Christmas shopping, to start preparing our house to welcome our three children home from university. But I couldn’t access my December salary. 

All my accounts had been frozen. Mary had to dip into her savings just so we could buy food. It was then she told me that our marriage was over and she wanted a divorce.

It was an awful Christmas. I told the children, who could not believe what I’d done. I went from hero to zero, from the doting father who cheered them on at school sports days and drove them to their first term at university, to a pariah in my own home.

Mary and I now live in different parts of the house and she won’t be in the same room as me.

Don’t get me wrong, I have been an idiot, and if I could turn back time I would. But I can’t undo the mistakes I’ve made.

I have university fees and accommodation to pay for, tax bills to pay, and I have used up my life savings. When Mary and I divorce I’ll be homeless.

I’m now 65 with no money, working five or six days a week as a GP. My plan was to retire when my children had graduated but I will need to keep working until I’m 75.

Now I’m having therapy and am on medication. I’ve barely slept for six months, I’ve lost 25 kilos and I’m smoking again.

I’m scared for the future so I’ve contacted a no-win, no-fee National Fraud Helpline firm –Richardson Hartley Law. They say I’ve got a good chance of recovering at least some of my money, particularly the £50,000 I lost through the fraud recovery scam.

I used to watch BBC’s Scam Interceptors and think the frauds they warned viewers about were obvious. When I tell my own story, it’s so obvious with hindsight. But when it was happening, it was not. I am a trusting man – but not a stupid one.

And I am only sharing my story so that others can learn from my mistakes. This kind of fraud can happen to anyone.

• Names have been changed. As told to Marianne Power