By Gus Saltonstall
An Upper West Sider was recently swindled out of $9 million in gold bars, police announced on Wednesday.
The crime dates back to the spring of 2025.
On March 26, 2025, a 67-year-old man who lives on the Upper West Side received an alert on his computer from an unidentified person falsely claiming to work for a security company and stating that the man’s financial assets had been compromised, police said.
The unidentified person then convinced the victim to purchase $9 million worth of gold bars, saying gold bars were safer than cash, and that in exchange for several of the bars, he would fix the financial security alert, NYPD added.
Then, on April 16, 2025, the 67-year-old man met the unidentified person on West 81st Street and Broadway, where he hand-delivered the gold bars to him, police said. It is unclear how many of the gold bars the victim handed over at the time, and NYPD did not immediately respond to the Rag’s question on it.
The unidentified man then immediately fled the Upper West Side street, NYPD said.
On Wednesday, police sent out a crime sheet on the specific case and also a photo of the suspect.
This August, the NYPD warned New Yorkers about a sophisticated group of scammers targeting seniors with the gold bar scheme that had already netted around $100 million.
Sergeant Rashawn Vaughn of the NYPD’s Financial Crimes Task Force explained the scheme in more detail to AMNY.
“Somebody gets on the line explaining that their computer was infected with a virus, and they need to gain access to their computer so they can fix the issue,” Vaughn told AMNY. “In this process, the victims are coerced into providing remote access to their computers, allowing these perpetrators to gain control. It means that they have access to your webcam, your printer, your audio, and your computer.”
The victim is then persuaded to liquidate all of their assets into gold bars. The people targeted in the con are between their 60s and 90s.
Anyone with information regarding the Upper West Side incident is asked to call the NYPD’s Crime Stoppers Hotline at 1-800-577-TIPS (8477) or for Spanish, 1-888-57-PISTA (74782).
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I feel horrible for the victim but I am also amazed that someone dumb enough to fall for this also accumulated $9 million. Did he win the lottery or was it inherited?
Also, this happened 1.5 years ago and it is just being publicized now? And I agree with the comment below about this not making sense given how much that much gold would weigh – a 67 year old man is lugging that weight around? Really? And the man shown in the pictures doesn’t exactly look like a body builder – I wouldn’t be shocked if he could carry that much, but it would not be easy.
WSR usually does great reporting but this really doesn’t add up.
The provenance doesn’t really matter and I wouldn’t automatically classify them as “dumb.” It’s very clear that this is an extremely rare and extremely vulnerable and extremely “valuable” target. Someone who’s completely unable to connect the simple dots between their assets being already “compromised,” yet they have the uninterrupted ability to access and liquidate them into goldbars to hand to a complete stranger on the street. And all this over a period of 20+ days and likely multiple different sell and buy transactions, without anyone – family member, banker, etc. – intervening. If the facts are as described, this is a very sick and lonely person in a very sad state, given their not-so-advanced age.
The victim “met the unidentified person on West 81st Street and Broadway, where he hand-delivered the gold bars to him”. How much does $9 M in gold bars weigh? In my mind it is too much for ine person to easily transport.
A little worried thay you would all mock me for being both naive and poor, I attempted to figure this out and came up with about 155 pounds. So the victim walked down the street lugging 155 pound suitcase or something?
And this is wjy I don’t have gold bars.
Thinking about it, he probably bought the gold bars from an entity connected to the scammers for way above market price (if they were even real); getting some of them back was just the cherry on the ice cream sundae for them. I don’t think it’s all that straightforward for a “civilian” to get his hands quickly on 150 lbs. of gold bars going through the usual channels–he was probably directed by the scammers to a specific vendor.
The article said he brought “several of the bars,” not all of them.
Well done, Alice. Your comment genuinely cracked me up.
“There’s one born every minute.” P.T. Barnum
Economic Darwinism?
From the below comments it’s clear that a number of people have no idea what can happen to people’s judgement as they age.
I can only assume they have very few friends and relatives because most of us have met judgmentally compromised people by our 40s, but?
Be careful. Because a time will come when you, or someone close, becomes compromised and vulnerable to this kind of scam.
The victim was only 67 years old.
I had to reread it a couple of times and still can’t comprehend so many aspects of the matter.
Right?! So the older man was to deliver a “couple” of gold bars as payment for addressing the alert.
Please explain why he lost all his money? If anything if he still had the rest he’s made nearly 15% on his investment (even after losing those 2 bars). So who dun it? Who took the rest of his gold??
And why such a delayed timeline reporting the incident??
We’ve got a podcast people😂
Only Gold Bars in This Building
The Mayor should have know better, They could not release the news till after he won the election. 🙂
Wow Mich, what a painfully stupid comment
On the corner where the exchange took place here is a FedEx store. Did the alleged perp use them to send the Gold out of the country?
Fear not. I’m sure Kash Patel is on the case.
He’s got his eye on things…
While I am always suspicious (and verify the source) when contacted on any matter, I am very glad I did that when I got a mailed notice on “Prudential” stationery about an alledged life insurance policy of my mother’s…ten years after her death!
Turned it was the real Prudential, which had taken over some forgotten policies for NYC agency employees– including my mother.
After submitting much required information, I was gifted with a four-figure check.
Then I got another notice regarding my late brother…and got another nice check.
I am never going to judge a letter by it’s envelope again!
That’s great, but aside from boasting, what is the point of this post?
I appreciated reading Raleigh Mayer’s comment. I bet other people did, too. Good to have read about his experience.
This is a valuable story, in fact so much so that West Side Rag apparently agreed to pay the informant who offered this information. The informant needed to be discreet, so asked for and received payment in gold bars.
As of today, $9,000,000 worth of gold would weigh approximately 159.5 avoirdupois (standard ‘bathroom scale’) pounds.
Unbelievable! Can’t let your guard down.
People need to watch “Beekeeper” movie.
Yes, that movie highlights dangers for older people who are not computer savvy.
Very sad to read something like this. How do you actually buy gold bars in the first place, and did they think that it would cost $9M to fix a computer virus?
Total BS.
Your opinion?
A lot of my professional work has involved fraud of various kinds. I want to be very clear about this: ANYONE CAN GET GOT. Mocking those who do only makes it harder for these crimes to be identified and prosecuted, as victims feel ashamed and are unwilling to come forward. And those of you who don’t fear senior cognitive decline have some nasty surprises waiting for you down the road.
A good, though not foolproof, way to help protect yourself is to be suspicious any time anyone says any transaction needs to be completed in a very short period of time. The more you’re pressured for speed, the more you should dig in your heels. Nothing’s going to happen if you take the time to verify what you’re being told independently.
This just can’t be true. People are stupid, but not THAT stupid to go out and buy $9MM of gold bars (where do you even do that?) only to hand them over to a complete stranger without vetting him or obtaining collateral worth at least twice as much as the gold?
If, per the article, it is unclear how many gold bars the 67 year old delivered to the stranger on W. 81 street, how was he swindled out of a total of $9 million in gold bars? And since when does fixing a “financial security alert” require any gold bars? This story sounds weird. It happened almost two years ago and police just sent out a crime sheet and photo on Wednesday?
The individual, for whatever reason, demonstrated a serious lack of good judgement. This individual should not be mocked or denigrated. Some of the comments are just plain nasty and inappropriate.
It is an insurance scam.
The victim received the alert March 26. He followed instructions, bought the gold bars, and handed over an unknown number of them to the thief on April 16. That is 22 days. One day over 3 weeks. I find it hard to comprehend the victim did not contact his financial institutions, broker, or even a friend (unless he had no friends) to discuss what was happening. So much doesn’t make sense.
Sorry but this is either fabricated or pathetic.
It was actually Jensen Huang, ex-CEO of Nvidia, who was targeted by Chinese hackers connected to the alleged Chinese spy Alice Huang. The gold bars went with her to Beijing recently.
New app for aging seniors: Claude will scan all email and voicemail for scams. ChatGPT will doublecheck.