Until retired engineer Eddie Rushe was scammed into losing \u00a335,000 online, he was often referred to as the big man.<\/p>\n
The 82-year-old from Lurgan, Co Armagh<\/a>, worked in the airline industry for decades and, in his spare time, bred and raced greyhounds.<\/p>\n From November 2023 until February last year, Mr Rushe was \u201cgroomed\u201d, according to his son, by fraudsters in an elaborate cryptocurrency<\/a> scam \u2013 which used AI<\/a>-generated deep fake images of consumer experts on social media advertisements.<\/p>\n The widower contacted a number after spotting an investment opportunity on a fraudulent online video.<\/p>\n Daily calls were then made to his mobile by a financial adviser called \u201cSophie\u201d who persuaded him to close his bank account and reopen a new one to make money transfers. <\/p>\n He was also convinced to open a second account with an online bank and buy a laptop to access his cryptocurrency. <\/p>\n Over the following 18 months, Mr Rushe was conned three separate times.<\/p>\n During that period he suffered a stroke that led to him being admitted to a hospital intensive care unit.<\/p>\n \u201cMy dad\u2019s just a shadow of himself. He\u2019s become inward,\u201d Michael Rushe told The Irish Times.<\/p>\n \u201cHe still races greyhounds, that\u2019s his get up and go to in the morning.<\/p>\n \u201cIf you take that away, you\u2019re taking away his independence. He\u2019s just a broken man.\u201d<\/p>\n Today, the pensioner is still getting calls from fraudsters posing as so-called recovery companies who promise to help him get his money back.<\/p>\n The tactic led to him being duped a second and third time following the initial scam when \u00a313,000 was moved from the online bank account to criminals.<\/p>\n Mr Rushe is now afraid to answer his phone.<\/p>\n When he was last scammed in June, fraudsters tricked him by lodging \u00a31,000 into his account.<\/p>\n \u201cOnce they get his details, they pass it on to a colleague who\u2019s either sitting in another room or another country \u2013 they just sell his data on and it\u2019s an easy one because he\u2019s been got before,\u201d said Michael Rushe.<\/p>\n \u201cMy dad blocks and deletes the numbers now. But they\u2019re very clever, they buy in bulk and use another fresh SIM card.\u201d<\/p>\n When Mr Rushe confided in his four children last year, his son recalls how embarrassed he was.<\/p>\n \u201cHe told us that every day he was doing this it was for us. We were heartbroken for him. <\/p>\n \u201cA few weeks later he fell and had a bleed on the brain. That led to him having a stroke \u2013 I firmly believe what has happened led to his illness.\u201d<\/p>\n The family reported the crime to the Police Service of Northern Ireland last January but have not heard anything since.<\/p>\n The case is now with the UK\u2019s financial ombudsman service, which has an office in Belfast.<\/p>\n Latest figures show a spike in cryptocurrency and investment fraud in recent years, with almost \u00a3630 million stolen in the UK during the first six months of 2025.<\/p>\n Up to \u20ac30 million has been reported stolen in the Republic over the past two years, a senior Garda expert confirmed on Monday.<\/p>\n Michael Rushe is pursuing the case with the finance watchdog and said it has become \u201call-consuming\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m an independent financial adviser so I\u2019m well versed in what these guys do behind the scenes,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019ve seen a lot of this happening on a day-to-day basis but when it\u2019s your blood, it\u2019s not easy.\u201d<\/p>\n He called for tougher measures to be introduced by financial authorities to protect vulnerable people.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s rife, it\u2019s a cancer and there\u2019s no legislation to prevent these people from doing it,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n \u201cThe big problem is that every time one gets closed down, another one opens up again. Police end up chasing their tail.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Until retired engineer Eddie Rushe was scammed into losing \u00a335,000 online, he was often referred to as the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":200190,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[73],"tags":[956,10613,289,79,10119,18,19,17,954,952],"class_list":{"0":"post-200189","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-business","8":"tag-an-garda-siochana","9":"tag-armagh","10":"tag-artificial-intelligence","11":"tag-business","12":"tag-cryptocurrencies","13":"tag-eire","14":"tag-ie","15":"tag-ireland","16":"tag-northern-ireland","17":"tag-police-service-of-northern-ireland-psni"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/115612924320746792","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200189","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=200189"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200189\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/200190"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=200189"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=200189"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=200189"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}