On November 14, 2024, the Montgomery County Police Department (MCPD) in Maryland, with assistance from the New York Police Department (NYPD) and the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI),. arrested 23-year-old Brooklyn resident Yongxian Huang for stealing nearly $400,000 from two 75-year-olds through a refund scam operation. The victims received text messages from an Indian call center fraudulently posing as Apple to falsely claim unauthorized charges were made on their accounts before transferring incoming calls to Huang, who posed as an officer with the Federal Trade Commission to convince their victims to convert their assets into gold bars to “safekeep them with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation” and “prevent them from being used for child pornography and missiles for the Russian Federation.”
Huang is currently held in a New York detention center awaiting extradition to Montgomery County, Maryland. The case is actively being investigated by the FBI and the Financial Crimes Section of the MCPD.