On April 29, 2025, the Barnegat Township Police Department in New Jersey, with assistance from the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation, arrested Chen Tongyong and Jianming Jiang for serving as money mules for an Indian tech suppoat scam where
- The elderly victims received a fake virus popup on their iPad, urging them to call the scammers who posed as “Apple Care” representatives.
- The scammers will falsely claim their victims’ bank accounts were compromised by a hacker, urging them to convert their savings into gold bars and surrender them to a “courier” so they can be “deposited into the Federal Reserve.”
- The scammers will later demand more money from their victims, which in one instance almost totaled to nearly $1 million.
Tongyong and Jiang are currently being held in the Ocean City Jail on charges of 2nd-degree theft by deception and the conspiracy to commit theft.