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![Scammers want gold bars a gold bar is sticking halfway out of an ATM card reader](https://aarp.widen.net/content/vu73qml4rs/jpeg/101307_FraudGpldBarScam_Chase.jpg?crop=true&anchor=0,0&q=80&color=ffffffff&u=mh5igy&w=2048&h=1177)
Linda Khandro, 77, is a scientist, educator, musician and artist in Seattle who found herself in an anxious frenzy last September, packing up three gold bars in an unmarked box that she then placed in the backseat of a car parked across the street from her home — a courier who was picking up her life savings, now in the form of gold, on behalf of the government, she was told.
The reason? A supposed official from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) told her that her accounts had been hacked and used to commit fraud and theft; to avoid arrest, she needed to send her money to a secure location until the case was resolved. She bought the bars, delivered to her home by UPS, after withdrawing $233,000 in retirement savings from her bank account — funds she couldn’t access unless she was retired. So she’d abruptly retired from her job as a college professor after nearly 32 years of teaching.
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Khandro ended up transferring a total of more than $400,000 (some of it in cash and bitcoin), nearly all she had, before realizing that she’d been the victim of an elaborate scam, as she recounted in a March 2024 episode of AARP’s The Perfect Scam podcast. “It was like the walls of my house blew down,” recalled Khandro, who described her emotions as “absolute rage.… I’ve never felt that angry in my life ever.”
While versions of this scam are disturbingly common, criminals asking for payment in gold bars is a relatively new twist, one that the FBI is seeing more frequently. From May to December 2023, its Internet Crime Complaint Center saw an uptick in scammers asking victims to liquidate their assets into cash or precious metals. In that time, the FBI reported in January, victims collectively lost over $55 million.
In March the FTC warned that many such scammers are pretending to be affiliated with the FTC, sometimes using real employees’ names.
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