200 'den fazla ABD'li yaşlı, servetlerini 250 MİLYON $ altınla teslim etti — Florida'da külçe eridikten sonra 40' tan fazla kişi suçlandı

Over 200 US seniors hand over fortunes in $250M gold scheme — 40+ indicted after bullion melted down in Florida

Rudro Chakrabarti

Tue, September 8, 2026 at 12:15 PM GMT+3 7 min read

Tarrant County DA, Shutterstock

More than 200 older adults were talked into withdrawing their savings and handing it to couriers sent to collect it.

Tarrant County, Texas, prosecutors put the total allegedly fleeced at more than $250 million. A call would come in warning that the victim's money wasn't safe where it was. The instruction was to get it out of the bank and into gold, bitcoin or cash.

And they say the gold rarely stayed gold for long. It moved through shell companies to a refinery in Florida, where gold bars became molten puddles.

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A key suspect stopped at JFK

Muzamil Ahmed, 35, of New Jersey, was arrested Sept. 3 at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York and was in the Tarrant County Jail as of Sept. 4, when the district attorney's office announced the arrest. District Attorney Phil Sorrells said Ahmed was waiting to board a flight to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.

"Instead, he caught a flight to Tarrant County and landed in our jail," Sorrells said after the arrest.

Ahmed was arrested on Tarrant County warrants charging him with financial abuse of the elderly, money laundering and engaging in organized crime for theft. A grand jury indicted him Aug. 28 on two counts of financial abuse of the elderly, according to court records. The indictment accuses him of swindling one Tarrant County resident out of between $30,000 and $150,000, and of taking money or gold from more than 35 other people.

Court records show he was being held on bonds totaling $3.15 million. Ahmed has not been convicted, and prosecutors must prove the counts against him in court.

Prosecutors say Ahmed operated out of New Jersey and created shell corporations to launder money stolen from older victims and funnel it to the Florida refinery. Investigators describe him as a central figure in the operation, according to CBS News Texas.

Two more people were arrested the same day, in Chicago and Newark, New Jersey, as they allegedly tried to flee to Canada, and prosecutors said they were working to extradite both to Tarrant County. Investigators told NBC 5 Dallas-Fort Worth that more arrests are likely.

The investigation had produced more than 40 indictments by early September, 18 of them handed down in April, FOX 4 reported. It began with a February raid on a Richardson jewelry store, and Sorrells has since tied the case to raids in Irving and Frisco as well.

How $250 million in gold disappears

It starts with a phone call from an overseas call center, most of them in India, according to FOX 4. Someone claiming to be from the victim's bank — or a federal agency — says the account, Social Security number or other personal information has been compromised. The fix, the caller says, is to get the money out: withdraw the savings and buy gold bars, buy bitcoin or simply hold it in cash.

Then a courier arrives, sometimes posing as a federal agent, and collects the gold or the cash, promising to keep it somewhere safe. From there, prosecutors say, it moved through shell companies to the refinery, and the gold and cash were converted into cryptocurrency and sent out of the country.

Sorrells described a division of labor to NBC 5: couriers who make the pickups, call-center staff who place the calls and jewelry businesses that smelt the gold down into bangles that can be carried overseas. Those already indicted include couriers accused of collecting from older victims and jewelers accused of melting the gold into jewelry, the Star-Telegram reported.

That last step is where the trail goes cold, because once bars are melted and blended into new stock, there's nothing left to identify. Officials say they've seized more than $130 million in gold connected to the scheme, according to the district attorney's office.

Sorrells said older victims are losing their security and their peace of mind, and that some will never recover. He also told CBS that at least one victim died by suicide after being left destitute.

Elder fraud losses hit $7.7 billion in 2025

Americans 60 and older filed 201,266 complaints with the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center in 2025 and reported $7.748 billion in losses, a 37% increase in complaints and a 59% increase in dollars from the previous year.

Older adults were about a fifth of everyone who filed a complaint, but more than a third of the money lost. The average reported loss across all ages last year was $20,699. For people 60 and older it was $38,500, and 12,444 of them lost more than $100,000 each.

Scams built specifically around gold couriers are a small share of that and growing fast. IC3 logged roughly 725 of them in 2025, with $311.8 million in reported losses, up from 525 complaints and $219 million the year before. That works out to more than $400,000 per complaint, roughly 10 times the average elder fraud loss.

How to spot a gold bar scam

No bank, federal agent or government office will ever ask you to convert your savings into gold or silver. Sorrells has said law enforcement will never ask anyone for cash, gold or cryptocurrency, and the FBI lists that instruction by name as a warning sign of elder fraud, alongside requests to buy gift cards or feed cash into a cryptocurrency ATM.
Nobody legitimate sends a courier to collect valuables, whether at your home or at a meeting spot, a pattern the FBI has warned about by name.
Treat a passcode as a warning, not reassurance. The FBI says scammers often tell victims to verify the courier with a code, sometimes the serial number on a dollar bill, to make the handoff feel official.
Hang up and call your bank back using a number you already have—the one printed on your statement or the back of your card, never one the caller gives you.
Contact your bank and the credit bureaus to safeguard your accounts and watch for suspicious activity.
Report it the same day. File at ic3.gov and call the National Elder Fraud Hotline at 833-372-8311. You can also report to the FTC at reportfraud.ftc.gov.

Authorities say they're still searching for others involved, and Sorrells has urged victims to contact them even if they feel embarrassed.