THEY MUST BE STOPPED

Cancer sufferer Tom loses £10k in WhatsApp crypto scheme

- KAITLIN EASTON

A CANCER victim says he has been scammed out of his savings in an elaborate cryptocurrency scheme.

Tom Roberts, 66, was gutted when he lost £10,000 of his retirement money and has now spoken out to warn others against investing in the "scam".

He said: "It is embarrassing - you don't want to tell anyone because they will think you are an idiot but this is all in hindsight.

"These people have to be stopped. I want to expose this company and make sure it doesn't happen to anyone else." Tom, from Kirkcaldy, is one in a group of about 30 people who claim to have been affected by the alleged scam run by Safe Holdings, a company registered in the Caribbean.

It claims to use state-of-the-art trading software to analyse the cryptocurrency market and make profitable investments.

Former oil worker Tom claims to have lost his retirement savings after investing with the company and had to deal with the fallout while undergoing chemo for high-grade lymphoma.

He invested £16,000 over the course of four months in 2021 and 2022 after being referred by a pal who was seeing a profit of about £300 per week. He now claims to have lost £10,000.

Tom and many others have mainly dealt with a man named Chris O'Brien who is understood to run the company and communicates with clients using the WhatsApp messaging service.

Tom told the Record: "I initially invested £1000 but I was being asked to invest more and because it looked so good, I did. I invested a total of £16,000.

"In September, I asked for £10,000 and I have been asking for it since. It has been pending for eight months. I realised something was wrong when I couldn't get the money out.

"I was diagnosed with cancer during all of this and I even told Chris I was dying but it didn't make any difference.

I was just ignored.