Hi all!
I am asking for help/advice. I found this forum through Jim Browning's youtube channel, not even sure if I'm at the right place because this is not a tech support scam. Last week I got an email from my father that he invested in bitcoin. I immediately suspected a scam, as he is old and not a tech person at all. I checked his pc and mails and found a chain of emails from different sources, but everything pointed to one "company": solutionsmarkets.co
We live in Hungary, my old man doesn't even speak English at all, I don't have the slightest clue how they even managed to scam him like this.
He told me, that he searched for bitcoin and somehow got called by "brokers" from London. He was gullible enough to transfer about 2000 euros to a Lithuanian bank account, also make another payment with a credit card for about 500 euros, and if it wasn't enough, they even tricked him into downloading anydesk and giving them access to his pc. They created a new Gmail account for him (what for?), and a profile to their fake "trading platform". When I found out, he already sent them copies of his ID card and what-not, also some bank account histories. So these scammers not even robbed us, but they have every sensitive data about my father you can imagine. I am trying my hardest to prevent further damage. We contacted the authorities, I told him he needs to renew all of his ID's. I reinstalled windows on his machine, reseted the router, even changed the network name/pass. We also contacted the affected banks, changed passwords. I changed his passwords to gmail, facebook. I don't feel safe, I even want him to buy a new phone and just destroy the old one, keeping only the sim card, who knows...
One of the worst feelings about this whole story is that I talked to two of the scammers. One was a woman, claiming she doesn't even know my father, she just laughed. It was so frustrating. The typical scammer-laugh, with that confidence, that they will get away with it. The other was a guy, "Gerald". I straight up told him, we want our money back, and stop playing stupid, I know they are not legit. He became angry, shouted at me, I told him some "nice wishes" and he then just hung up.
I am writing this whole story down for two reasons:
1. I am not willing to accept that they will get away with this. I want justice, I want to see them punished for what they are doing. Is there any way to get back to these scumbags? I don't even care whether we get our money back or not. I just want to get back to them and wipe down that disgusting smile from their face.
2. What else should I do to ensure security? They got a lot of sensitive documents. Is it enough to report it and get new passes/IDS? Or is there anything else we should do immediately?
Thanks for all the responses in advance, it is much appreciated!