Chapter 136

$680,000 CAD was an absurdly large number and honestly $480,000 isn’t so small either. Out of these two numbers you can math out that there is around $200,000 that is unaccounted for. Let’s start the conversation at where that came from here first.

In any case, any of those amounts were large sums. How do you get that much money? How do you LOSE that much money? Who has that much fluid cash flow lying around? WHY USE THAT MUCH AT ONCE?

The answer? As simple as it is painful. The timeline took a long time to process and understand because my mom tried to omit a lot of details but after a LOT of deliberation, here is what I think happened. 

Let me tell you how a “pig butchering scam” works. 

Someone on WeChat, a popular Chinese social media platform, reached out to my mom for her to join a group of lecturers for universities. There, they talked about all kinds of stuff. My mom, being a lecturer that taught in a Canadian university, was quickly welcomed into the group. She was revered for establishing herself with little English and still managing to work at a prestigious university. Little conversations about university employment eventually went further and the group started talking about other aspects of life. My mom, being an activist for the right wing, eventually shared and spoke out on topics regarding the right and to her surprise, EVERYONE there agreed with her and praised her for every insight she had. 

She was well received and highly regarded. Everyone there loved her. The only other person in the group chat that garnered as much admiration was the group leader, who was named “The Professor of Professors”. In the group chat, he rarely spoke. However, every time he did speak, everyone else paid a lot of attention and would always praise his insight. Even more so than my mom. 

This Professor of Professors was a very well regarded professor at one of the most prestigious universities in China and more times than not, he comes off as a little bit mysterious and a little bit hard to get hold of. All the other people in the chat always asked for his help but he would rarely speak out. It appeared that he answered only to himself. Being hard to hold off was always played off as a sign that he always had something big going on and that his time was very precious. Which is why it was all the more amazing that he actively took time to reach out to my mom. He reached out to my mom because after a few messages he claimed that he saw in her a very unique and strong caliber of intellect. From there, my mom was hooked. 

The professor then proceeded into sweet talking my mom about pretty much everything. Politics here and there. Life and family here and there. Slowly, he bent the narrative. The professor was of an economics and finance background and, yes, there are political affiliations with all of this but he didn’t care much for it. He saw into the future and knew that all of these squabbles with politics were all to do with money and money was something he had no issues with at all. 

He came off as someone with a lot of money and more importantly, he knew how to get it too. He was a prophet for investing and after a lot of conversations with my mom, he eventually opened up to her about how he came to be so wealthy. He was an entrepreneur into an online goldmine called “bitcoin”. Slowly but surely, my mom got invested and invested. A little bit of money was first put in and it yielded a little return. Then, a little more. Then, the story goes on. 

As the weeks went by, my mom gained more and more trust. At some point, my mom was told by the professor about a really good deal in the market coming up and told my mom to invest “everything”. So she did. She went to the bank and withdrew as much money as her account allowed and invested it all. What happened next? The website went down. 

The Professor of Professors confessed that he didn’t know what was going on and that he was going to try and work on it. He then assured my mom that he would do everything in his power to get the site back up and that it would take a lot of effort. With this last line. He disappeared.

From what I gather, a few weeks would pass by and my mom would finally come around to what really happened. As the realization set in, she was now left with a question. What now?

She called 911. A policeman came to her house and took a situation report. But that was it. What else could they do? My mom was angry that they couldn’t do anything but honestly, what did she expect? It was now too late. 

What does she do after that? She looked for Chinese policemen to look into the case. They were closer to the crime and because they spoke Mandarin and being someone who spoke her mother tongue, she went to depend on them quite a lot. But here’s a problem, have you ever heard of a Chinese police force that cracks down on cyber crime? I’m sure I haven’t. After researching where she got the source for these cyber police forces, I came to the conclusion that they too, were just scams. I think what gave it away is that Police don’t ask for private money contributions to work. A fact I had to explain to my mom again and again. 

Despite the sketchiness, she still paid. She was desperate. At some point during all of this, the original website for bitcoin not only went down but completely disappeared. She got more desperate and threw more money at the Chinese cyber police until eventually, she ran out of the money from remortgaging the house. 

She should have stopped when she ran out. She really should have stopped and just told someone about it. Instead, she took out all the money she had in her RRSP and kept going after shadows.

As much as I want to tell you that this was when she finally came to her senses, it wasn’t. 

When the money from RRSP was used up, she went to 2 loan agencies and borrowed another $100,000 CAD from each of them using the house as collateral. Both of these loans had interest rates of around 11% to 12%. These were horrible deals and yet, she still went through with it. 

(For those who understand what 11 and 12% really mean and what taking money out of RRSP really means…yeah…don’t worry, we’ll be talking more about them as we go further).

This last bit only required a few sentences to tell but honestly, it was probably the most painful experience I have endured in my entire family history. Just the sheer amount of effort it took to get money off of something so stupid hurts. 

This was devastating.It is painful even as I am writing it now, a very long time after it all happened. Mercifully, when she ran out of money from those two loans, she had nothing left. It was only then that she finally came to her senses and spoke to me. 

Except that’s not how that really played out. She went to my cousin, T1, first.