American authorities have charged a British man in connection with an online whisky scam operated from the UK.
According to a court document, British defendant Casey Alexander and his alleged co-conspirators deceived elderly victims out of millions of dollars, convincing them that they were investing in caskets of expensive wine and whisky that were being held on UK soil and would one day be sold for a profit.
Victims were persuaded to wire money or send cheques to three companies registered in the US, one of which was supposed to be headquartered in the UK, with the goal of investing in stores of wine or whisky.
The defendants are accused of cold-calling victims in the US and using “aggressive and deceptive tactics”, fooling them with the promise of large returns on wine and whisky investments.
According to court documents, people with ‘British accents’ kept calling and emailing the victims convincing them to keep investing “by promising even larger returns on their initial investments”, yet the FBI alleges none of the victims have, to date, received anything.
The victims reported that they had never heard of the companies before they were contacted.
All those charged are accused of conspiring to commit wire fraud through the alleged whisky scam between November 2021 and 14 June 2022.
More than US$13mln of whisky or wine investments were part of the fraudulent scheme, the FBI’s affidavit said.
All of the money was traced to investors based in the US.
Federal investigators claim that the companies “engaged in a cold-calling scheme to target investors throughout the United States to invest in their purported wine and whiskey brokerage programs”.
They identified more than 150 victims after analysing the accounts of the suspect companies.