How a Fake Police Call Stole £250,000 in Crypto

Added: 2026-05-28

[00:00:01]This is where I received the phone calls. This is where my life-changing experience happened. What started out as a fairly insignificant day pottering about his kitchen, Mark Peacock now remembers as the day he and his wife lost over a quarter of a million pounds worth of cryptocurrency.

[00:00:20]And I received a phone call. It was a blocked caller ID and the person said it was Thames Valley Cyber Crime who arrested someone who had a huge amount of personal details on them all about me.

[00:00:34]And they told me uh their crime reference number, their badge number, and after 24 hours I was allowed to go to any police station of my choice where I lived, show them the crime reference number, and the police officer's name, and I was allowed to view all the evidence they had on me. What you're about to hear is audio from similar scam calls which Mark recorded after fraudsters continued to contact him. He did have on his notes um Ledger Recover. Does that relate to you in any way, shape, or form? Ledger Recover. To Mark, it did. Ledger was the company that makes the wallet where he stored his cryptocurrency. Panicked by what he'd been told, he spent the next hour desperately trying to secure his accounts because Ledger Recover is a feature used to access your crypto wallet if you've lost your passphrase.

[00:01:24]Then came another call from someone posing as a rep from Ledger who convinced Mark of his supposed identity over email and quoted the same crime reference number.

[00:01:35]We've seen wallets drained within 4 to 6 hours after Ledger Recover breach is triggered. So, to stay safe, we recommend moving your funds temporarily to a secure exchange or trusted wallet that you've already got control of. We was convinced he worked for Ledger, so we went and plugged our Ledger in. He told us what to look for, not to show us our tell us our keys, our passwords.

[00:01:56]Little known to us, he had a mask in the back, so whatever we typed in, he said, "The phone went dead."

[00:02:03]We looked at our screen, and everything just disappeared from from in within our eyes. We just couldn't believe it. It's just gone.