• Sam Bankman-Fried, FTX, SOL, CEL, XRP, ETH, etc. are some of the high-profile crypto scams and scammers.
• Houston Attorney Andrew J. Cobos is currently handling a legal dispute involving an elderly woman who was allegedly scammed out of her $80,000 bitcoin investment.
• The case is set to go to trial in Spring 2023 in Harris County, Texas and the plaintiff accuses the pastor of stealing her bitcoin by using her private keys.

Houston Attorney Andrew J. Cobos of the Cobos Law Firm has recently been handling a legal dispute involving an elderly woman who allegedly lost her investment of $80,000 in bitcoin to a scammer. This case is one of many examples of the low-profile crypto ripoffs that fly under the mainstream media radar.

The elderly woman in question was approached by a young pastor at her church in 2017 who encouraged her to invest in bitcoin by transferring her money to him. Both of them entered into an oral agreement that the pastor would use her money to buy bitcoin and store it for her safely. However, the plaintiff now accuses the man of stealing her bitcoin by using her private keys. According to the lawsuit, the pastor purchased and held the bitcoin for the elderly woman until July 2020, when the woman requested that the bitcoin be returned. The pastor then set up a Trezor hardware wallet containing 7.742 bitcoin and gave the woman the device along with a seed phrase card that the pastor had completed. Days later, the woman opened the Trezor to find that all of her bitcoin had been removed from the device. Cobos alleges that the pastor maintained a copy of the seed phrase card and recreated the wallet after giving her the Trezor and then transferred all of the bitcoin to a separate wallet that he controlled.

The case is set to go to trial in Spring 2023 in Harris County, Texas (case number 2021-51487). By handling this case, Cobos hopes to raise awareness of the many crypto scams that are out there and is urging people to be careful when investing in bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. He also reminds investors to always get a written contract in place before investing and to thoroughly read the fine print. With these precautions, hopefully, investors can avoid becoming victims of crypto scams.