ARVADA, Colo. — Debbie Fox lost $58,000 in a romance scam.
That was hard enough. The process of trying to recover from that loss, she said, has been just as difficult.
The Arvada resident is telling her story because she hopes to advocate for victims of cybercrime, who she says face a confusing and frustrating process when it comes to reporting the crime, seeking justice and finding services.
“There's a lot of this story post realization of what really happened where I have felt victimized again, revictimized by the system,” Fox told Steve On Your Side.
“I realized that once you become a victim of crime, it is such a crazy path - unexpectedly crazy,” she said.
The crime
In the fall of 2023, Fox said, she was feeling confident.
“I had just come off of 18 months of wonderful solo travel and adventure,” she said. “I just really felt comfortable and confident and had a great strong sense of self.”
The confidence led Fox to an online dating platform called Luxy.
“I came across a profile of a man that had very gentle expression,” Fox said. “His profile was very warm and inviting.”
The man, named Russell, presented himself as a rich international businessman who split time between California and Florida.
“We had a phone call that went well, then we decided to be in regular contact and video chat,” she said. “And that was really at my urging, because I felt that was a little bit more safety - actually seeing the face of a human interacting."
Fox said over the next six weeks, she and Russell had deep intellectual conversations over video chat. Still, she had her suspicions. But Russell seemed to always have the right answer – directing her to websites for his solar energy business and showing her documents to prove his claims.
“I was able to find out that his business in California was registered LLC,” she said. “And it seemed to align with what he was sharing with me.”
Around the time the conflict in Gaza began, Fox said Russell told her it was having a downstream impact on a solar project he ran in Saudi Arabia.
“He said there were a couple of employees in Saudi Arabia who sabotaged the project by removing a piece of equipment that resulted in an explosion, two deaths, three injuries,” she said. “He said was being required by the courts in Saudi Arabia to make these families whole. He was self-insured on this project.”
Suddenly Russell told Fox he needed money.
“He said, 'I am embarrassed even asked you this, but I'm short $48,000. Is there any way you can help me?'” Fox said.
Fox had her doubts, but she said Russell wore her down. She said he offered her loan documents with promises to pay her back quickly when he could access his foreign accounts. Fox, who’d just spent a lot of time traveling, said it didn’t seem out of the ordinary that Russell couldn’t access his own money because she knew how difficult that was to do in foreign countries.
“I'm just like, OK, I'm either trusting or I'm not,” she said. “I'm either gonna give this relationship a try or not. This man's in crisis or not. I just was on the fence of not knowing what to do. And so I did it. And I thought, OK, poof, he's going to be gone. And he wasn't.”
Russell kept in contact for several weeks. And suddenly, he approached Fox for more money. He said he needed $10,000 more.
“At this point, you know, I've given him money. He didn't go away,” she said. “He's really touching base with me. I'm gaining comfort and confidence that this man truly is sticking around, and he's legit, and he's not scamming me, because if he were scamming me, he'd be poof, gone.”
So she wired more money.
“Then suddenly, his attorney is reaching out to me, his alleged attorney, and saying, oh, Russell's been imprisoned,” she said.
“I thought, OK, this -- people can have bad luck. This is a lot of bad luck in a row,” she said.
At this point, she realized Russell might not be who he said he was.
The struggle afterward
“I take ownership in playing the part that I did. You know, I sent the money. I didn't realize that I was being psychologically manipulated, but I was,” she said.
Fox said the next steps were tricky. Her financial advisor told her to go to the bank and see if she could get the wires reversed. She couldn’t.
She then filed a report with the U.S. Department of Justice’s Internet Crime Complaint Center. She filed reports with the Department of Homeland Security, the Federal Trade Commission and the Securities and Exchange Commission.
“I was told from the federal agencies that my loss isn't significant enough to investigate it on its own,” she said.
“I would compare it to being diagnosed with stage one cancer. ‘I'm sorry, Miss Fox, but you have stage one cancer, but we're not going to treat your case until you are reached at stage four,’ is what it feels like to me," she said.
She said during all of this, she was operating from trauma – she’d just lost a huge sum of money and suddenly lost a relationship with a man she thought she could trust.
She struggled to find victims' resources, like mental health help to deal with that trauma.
The investigation
Through all of her attempts to reach someone to help her with this case, Fox reported the theft to the Arvada Police Department, where the case landed on the desk of Detective Adam Ross.
“Her case right away didn't seem crazy different compared to a lot of cases that I've seen come through my door,” Ross told Steve On Your Side. “But then I quickly realized that it was actually going to lead me down a completely different path.”
Ross said these cases have traditionally been difficult to investigate because often money goes straight to cryptocurrency. Most police investigations end here – with the assumption that crypto is untraceable.
His assumptions were confirmed when he subpoenaed bank records from Fox’s wire transfers. Her money was transferred out to Coinbase – a cryptocurrency exchange.
“I always thought it was untrackable, untraceable. There's a layer of anonymous to it,” Ross said. “We're never going to be able to track where the money went. When it went to crypto it's just kind of poof, gone.”
Fox’s case helped Ross convince his bosses to get him certified in cryptocurrency investigation.
“All of my previous assumptions about cryptocurrency in general, are probably just straight up wrong,” he said.
Ross said he subpoenaed Coinbase for records about the account where Fox’s money was transferred. He said the exchange was helpful and got him the information he needed.
“Every single transaction that has ever occurred within cryptocurrency from 2009 through today, through two seconds ago, is all online,” Ross said.
Through a process tough to explain to a television reporter, Ross explained he was able to track transactions and learn exactly where Fox’s money went.
“I was able to identify that money going to an actual centralized exchange,” he said. “The issue is that that centralized exchange occurs internationally. It's not based in the United States. And that's kind of where it's difficult from my vantage point, because I'm a certified police officer for Arvada, the state of Colorado.”
Ross wouldn’t tell Steve On Your Side where that exchange is because the investigation is still open and he believes there still could be progress.
But he said his investigative process is something that could be copied by other police departments – who often stop investigating once they hear the word "cryptocurrency.”
“There's jurisdictions, police departments, detectives for that matter who do want to look into this and do want to investigate these,” Ross said. “And with the proper knowledge and the education, I think over time we can get there.”
After Russell
“That's really frustrating for me to know that there's a breadcrumb of trails to this individual. Like, someone is still in touch with this individual,” Fox said. “And it's really, really hard for me to sit here in this moment in time and know that that's the case, that that's the reality, that the door is still open somewhere.”
Fox said she’s planning to use this experience to advocate for others in her place. She’s already writing a novel about her experience with Russell. Sharing her story with Steve On Your Side was an important part of that process.
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