Gujarati, Chinese duo dupe US couple out of $1.4m in gold | Ahmedabad News – Times of India

AHMEDABAD: A man from Gujarat and his Chinese associate have been arrested for their involvement in conning two elderly US couples out of their life’s savings by having it converted into gold.
Harmish Patel, a migrant from Gujarat, and Wenhui Sun from China have been arrested by Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) officials for the fraud currently totalling nearly $1.4 million.The reach of their operations is being investigated.
Patel, aged around 25, was arrested on July 29 for scamming a couple from Troy, New York, out of $1 million. Wenhui Sun was involved in cheating an elderly couple from Maryland of $331,817 in a similar manner. HSI joined the dots of their connection through Patel’s phone records.
On Dec 1, 2023, the Troy couple received an email purportedly from PayPal Inc stating that their account had been charged $465.88, which would be deducted within 24 hours. The email provided two telephone numbers for customer support if they did not recognise the transaction or wanted to cancel the charges.
A man calling himself Will Gannon, an employee of Microsoft, was on the other end of ‘customer support’ and provided the number of a woman named Elizabeth Schneirov, an “assistant director at the Federal Trade Commission”.
Schneirov told the couple that their savings were in jeopardy as their social security numbers had been compromised. Offering to help them protect the ir money, Schneirov advised them to liquidate some of their assets and place the money in a US Treasury Department locker. Believing they were speaking to real federal employees, the couple followed her advice and on Dec 5, 2023, made an online transaction of $102,000 to one Dingxi Trade Limited located in China.
Schneirov called them again on Dec 7, telling them to convert the rest of their funds into gold for safekeeping in the treasury department locker. Between this call and Jan 2024, the couple made three gold bullion purchases totalling at least $1 million.
Patel traced through car’s number plate
In the two months, Harmish Patel, a resident of Streamwood in Illinois, collected gold worth $1,058,082 from the couple, arriving in a car at their residence. When the couple demanded their money back as they we re headed on a sixmonth vacation in Jan, a fake US agency officer told them that their social security number would be scrapped.
The couple then approached their financial advisor, who, suspecting fraud, approached law enforcement agencies.
US law enforcement agencies and HSI special agents zeroed in on Patel based on his car’s number plate.
His phone records showed that Patel had allegedly often made video calls to a person marked as ‘Conspirator Z’ in HSI records. Further probe revealed that in Feb 2024, another couple from Silver Spring, Maryland, too had been scammed of $331,817 in a similar manner and led to Wenhui Sun’s arrest.
Sun claimed that he was working on the directions of a man from China. Patel’s chats showed that he had given directions to a contact named ‘Best Friend’ to pick up gold from the Maryland couple.