A North Texas veteran said he was swindled out of hundreds of thousands of dollars in a cryptocurrency scam.
James Kachel, of Plano, is an Army veteran who served in the Gulf War.
He spent the last 16 years working for the United State Postal Service. When he left last year, he said he started looking into investing in cryptocurrency to make extra money.
“Surprisingly, at the time I was thinking about doing it, here comes the message,” Kachel explained.
“The message” on WhatsApp was from someone who said their name was ‘Katherina’, and offered to help and teach Kachel how to invest in cryptocurrency.
It started, he said, with a small transaction in July 2021 through what he thought was a crypto trading site.
As his trust in ‘Katherina’ grew, so did the investments.
After about six months, more than 100 pages worth of messages, and dozens of transactions later, he said he tried to withdraw money from the $4 million he was told he’d made.
“They were saying, ‘Oh you’ve got to do this first because you’ve been flagged’,” Kachel recalled.
Kachel said he spent weeks getting the runaround, realizing it was all a scam and that the app he thought was a trading site was actually a clone of a real crypto marketplace.
“It was heartbreaking,” Kachel said.
His biggest regret, he said, is using money that was supposed to pay for his mom’s assisted living.
Total, Kachel said he was scammed out of at least $220,000.
“It’s a…
