Overview

• A 41-year-old Langenfeld resident lost €250,000 in cryptocurrency after entering login credentials and security codes on a fraudulent website.
• Perpetrators impersonated employees of an online trading platform, using SMS warnings of suspicious activity and follow-up phone calls to harvest data.
• Initial probes into the telephone number and fake site have produced no leads and the fraudulent website no longer exists.
• The investigation has been escalated to the Kriminalpolizei amid a wider wave of sophisticated multi-channel crypto scams across Germany.
• Local police have reiterated that banks and authorities never request passwords or security codes by phone, SMS, email or messaging apps.