Yongxian Huang, a 24-year-old Chinese man from Brooklyn, pretended to be a government employee in Montgomery County, Maryland, and tricked an elderly couple into buying gold bars worth more than 400,000 yuan and handing them over to him. Huang Yongxian was later arrested for the scam and charged with conspiracy to steal, attempted theft and theft. Huang Yongxian recently pleaded guilty in the Montgomery County Circuit Court and will face a maximum sentence of ten years and six months.
Court documents show that since September 2024, a 75-year-old couple in Montgomery County have received a text message that appears to be from Apple, saying that their Apple account has been deducted without authorization, and the text message requires the elderly couple to contact Apple representatives.
Out of concern, the victims called the phone number they were told and spoke to several people claiming to be Apple employees. Finally, they contacted Huang Yongxian, who claimed to work for the Federal Trade Commission.
Huang Yongxian told the elderly couple that their assets were not safe and that they had to exchange their assets for gold bars and deposit them with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation to prevent their assets from being used for child pornography and purchasing Russian missiles, and that he could be responsible for storing the gold bars for the elderly.
The elderly couple, who believed it, purchased gold bars worth more than 367,000 yuan and handed them to Huang Yongxian and his accomplices, and transferred more than 41,000 yuan. After this, the couple realized that they had been deceived and reported the case to the Montgomery County Police Department (MCPD).
The Montgomery County Police Department’s Financial Crimes Unit, in cooperation with the FBI’s Baltimore agents, continued to contact Huang Yongxian and arranged for him to withdraw gold bars worth 84,000 yuan. On November 14, 2024, a detective posing as a victim handed a package containing fake gold bars to Huang Yongxian, who then got in the car and left.
Huang Yongxian was under police surveillance throughout his drive back to Brooklyn and was subsequently arrested by officers from the New York City Police Department. The defendant was initially detained in a detention center in New York City and was later extradited back to Montgomery County for trial.
