An Upper East Side granny lost her entire life savings to cold-hearted online scammers \u2013 and now, she\u2019s taking her banks to court.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The twisted scheme began in August 2023, when a pop-up window on 86-year-old Nina Mortellito\u2019s computer falsely warned her that her bank accounts had been hacked, according to a lawsuit filed Friday in Manhattan Supreme Court.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Over the next nine months, Mortellito \u2013 who suffers from age-related memory issues \u2013 was convinced by the fraudsters to withdraw a total of approximately $700,000 in a series of unusual withdrawals, and send them the dough for safekeeping, according to court papers.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Upper East Sider Nina Mortellito, 86, was scammed out of her entire life savings \u2014 because of her banks\u2019 negligence, the lawsuit contends. Courtesy of Robert Georges<\/p>\n
She withdrew a total of around $275,000 from her Merrill Lynch accounts, and transferred it to the scammers, who had convinced her that the money must be converted into gold bullion in order to be secure, and wired another $150,000 from her TD Bank account to a gold bullion dealer in Texas, according to the court docs.<\/p>\n
The elderly woman also mailed off a $30,000 check, and took out over $100,000 from her accounts at UBS Bank at the fraudsters\u2019 instructions, according to the suit.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The sudden and large transactions were completely out of character for Mortellito, whose withdrawals never topped $5,000 in the over 30 years that TD Bank managed her accounts, and in the two decades she banked with UBS, the court papers claimed.\u00a0<\/p>\n