Help pay Bills and Tuition, Phishing Awareness

Hello! My name is Kelly and I would like to use my story to raise awareness for Phishing. I would also like to ask for help in funding my bills and tuition.

I was a victim of phishing and lost all of my life's savings of $20,000.

I am writing this to ask for help. I know in a couple weeks, I will not be able to pay for my bills with the money I have currently. I am also unsure on how to pay the last of my tuition for next year. I am currently on a need base aid system, and do not have the money to cover the rest of the tuition.

I had been especially working hard in college for the past several years to save money to go to Graduate School. I had also wanted to use this money to be able to give back to my parents, by buying them a trip to Europe some day. My mom raised me and my brother single handedly while working, and my dad live apart from us because of his job to give us a better education in the US and to bring me to where I am today.

The job I am employed at will not provide enough funding to pay for those bills. I had previously used my savings to help pay for the bills every month, but now I am unable to do so. In addition, I was planning to use my funds to help me throughout Graduate School, where I plan to study neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's or Cancer, both interests motivated my family history and personal experiences.

However, I am unsure of where I will be able to go moving forward because I don't know if I will have money to buy food and pay my bills in a couple months. And I no longer have the funds for Graduate School if I were to be accepted.

Phishing is the act of fraudulent criminals posing as an employee of a reputable company to withdraw money from the victim. Majority of the victims of phishing are the elderly, but many fraudulent groups rely on demographics such as college students to be their victims as many can be naive. As a college student, I fit right into the target demographic.

The crime happened all in one morning, one wrong call and trusting the wrong people, I lost my life savings. Looking back, I don't know why or how I was unable to detect the red flags and stop myself from listening to the criminals, but the damage was done.

I received an email saying that I had fraudulent charges on my Paypal account. So I searched up the Paypal Customer Service number and was directed to people who turned out to be criminals. I want to raise awareness that there are many, many fraudulent numbers out there posing as these big companies. And their numbers sometimes pop up first on search engines before the actual company's numbers.

The type of phishing I was victim to involves crypto currency, or as it is most commonly known, Bitcoin. There is nothing that can be done to retrieve the money back once it has been converted. Not even the police can do anything about it, and it will take months with no guarantee of getting the money back for other government agencies to find the criminals.

I want to warn anyone and everyone out there that they could also be a victim of phishing. Please do not trust ANYONE claiming to be government agencies or banks as they handle everything by physical mail. Please trust your friends and family, your bank, and especially YOURSELF before handing money over to someone you do not know the face of. I was unable to do this, and I want my experiences to stop other people from also becoming victims.

Thank you everyone for taking the time to read my story. I hope that moving forward, you will also be more aware of looking for Phishing in daily life and avoiding becoming a victim. I hope my experience has raised awareness.

Please help fund my bills and help me save up for Graduate School if you are able to. Thank you!