SHORELINE, Wash. — One Shoreline family is trying to bounce back after falling victim to an online scam that drained their life savings.
Daniel Hovland says it started last May when his wife answered an ad on Facebook to earn some money on the side.
“I was like, ‘it looks like a scam, you shouldn’t get involved with it,’” said Hovland.
The job called for looking at videos online, then liking and sharing them to help social media influencers monetize their accounts.
“It would allow them to monetize faster, thus we would be getting a cut of their monetization,” said Hovland.
He says his wife was getting paid through a digital account. Then he started doing it and they were making more and more money.
“I consistently got paid and it’s not normal for a scam to pay you,” he said.
Hovland then encouraged other family and friends to jump onboard.
He explained they would have to re-invest money to reach new earning levels, like a multi-level marketing business.
Hovland says it lasted for about six months.
Then suddenly, the company’s website was gone, and through a chat room, they were told they were fired.
They realized their money was also gone. Nearly $40,000 of the Hovland’s money – around $500,000 for the entire group.
“It was traumatic. Definitely it’s one of the toughest times I think that we’ve ever have gone through,” Hovland said.
It’s a scam known as “pig butchering.”
“Where they’re fattening you up to basically get slaughtered later,” said Hovland.
The FBI says tens of billions of dollars are lost every year in the U.S. to those scams.
“They get you to think you’re putting your money in a safe place and once they feel like they have all of your money, they decide to cut off contact,” said Special Agent Andrew Cropcho with FBI Seattle.
Cropcho says it’s extremely difficult for victims to get their money back.
“The faster you can figure out it’s happened to you and report it to everybody that you can think to report it to, the better chance there is of making some kind of recovery,” said Cropcho.
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