One month ago, a retired professor from an Irish university sent a carefully worded email to his four adult children.
The message was short and to the point: he had lost the entirety of his and his wife’s life savings.
Their inheritance was gone, he told them. Any remaining money, including his monthly pension, would have to go towards repaying a bank loan he took out to invest further in the scam.
There would be no more presents for the grandchildren.
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“We shall do our utmost to retain the house, the car and the modest supply of petrol,” he wrote.
In total, the soft-spoken academic, who lives in south Dublin, had handed over more than €1.05 million to an alleged scam operation, financial documents show. He now accepts his chances of recovering any money are minimal.
The professor, who is aged in his late 70s, is one of thousands of Irish people who have fallen victim to investment scams in recent years. He asked to remain anonymous as he does not want to compromise an ongoing Garda investigation.
[ Irish people among international scammers’ most sought-after targetsOpens in new window ]
The professor shared voluminous emails and payment records with The Irish Times outlining his dealings with the scam operation over a 12-month period.
Bank of Ireland data from the first part of 2025 showed that more than half of reported cases of investment fraud occurred with customers age 65 and older.
Using sophisticated call-centre operations and employing a mixture of social engineering, cloned websites and assurances of high-yield investment wealth, scammers are extracting vast sums from Irish victims. Some of the victims have spent years saving funds for their twilight years.
Last year almost €31 million was reported stolen in Ireland through investment fraud, up from €14 million in 2021. In the three months to October, gardaí recorded a 21 per cent increase in investment fraud.
This is likely a vast undercount, as many victims do not go to gardaí, often due to the embarrassment at having been caught up in a scam. Globally, an estimated €1 trillion is stolen from victims in scams.
The professor said he had always been a “good saver” and has built up investments with legitimate financial companies over the year.
By last year, he had about €800,000 saved. But he wanted more in case he or his wife required nursing care as they grew older, while leaving some money aside for his children.
The professor doesn’t recall exactly how he came across the financial recommendation for the supposed investment firm, but he believes it was from one of the WhatsApp groups he belonged to – a growing trend where criminals infiltrate groups posing as members to push investment scams. After entering his personal details, he was very quickly contacted by a “financial adviser”.
She persuaded him to invest an initial sum of €250 on September 19th, 2024 before passing him on to the “senior financial adviser”.
This new agent called herself Erica Kulikowski and claimed to work for an investment firm called Glenstone Advisory, based in Basle, Switzerland. Her email address appeared genuine, the professor said.
Kulikowski claimed to the professor she was from Poland. Public records show there is a legitimate broker of the same name who was registered in the United States until 2023 but there is no suggestion of a link between the two.
It is possible the Kulikowski who contacted the professor adopted the identity of her American namesake to provide her with additional cover for her fake persona.
At the top of the Google search results for “Glenstone Advisory” was a slick looking website, full of generic but credible financial jargon.
With his agreement, Kulikowski devised a strategy that involved investing the professor’s money in various start-up cryptocurrencies before withdrawing the funds at the peak of their value.
He got on well with the woman, but she sometimes became confrontational.
“I suppose she was reasonably friendly, but she could be hard as well, especially when it came to getting more money,” he said.
He handed over the first big sum, €5,000, on October 1st, 2024, which went into a Revolut account. The figures quickly increased.
On December 18th, he transferred €90,000. On Christmas Eve, he handed over sums totalling €84,000.
During one 24-hour period, the professor made 49 transfers. He says “Erica” advised him to transfer the funds in small amounts to avoid raising red flags with the banks.
He made the “investments” himself while following exact instructions from Kulikowski, who was able to monitor his phone screen, he said.
Over the months, Kulikowski sent the professor links to his supposed financial portfolio showing massive profits.
“I tend to believe that the early investments went into crypto and were transparent. But I think basically they wanted my million euros,” he said.
One day Kulikowski promised the professor a unique but urgent opportunity: he could double and even triple his current profits by investing in Oilchain, which was billed as a new cryptocurrency based on the oil market.
The professor was interested and agreed to invest the remainder of his €800,000 savings. Soon he was making “stupid profits”, he said, at least on paper.
One day, Kulikowski showed him data stating he had made €13 million, far more than the professor ever thought possible.
These sums made the professor consider if it was all too good to be true. When he questioned Kulikowski, she sent him a link to a site appearing to prove Glenstone’s credentials.
Essentially, it’s gone. I know there’s a small chance of some of it being recovered. But essentially, I’ve got to live without it
— Retired professor
Elsewhere, he found several online reviews of the company. Most were positive but some alleged fraud. Kulikowski explained away the negative reviews as coming from disgruntled customers who missed out on profits by withdrawing their funds too early
Every time the professor asked to withdraw his money, he says, Kulikowski told him: “We can do that later.” His suspicions increased when he decided to withdraw some of his money from his crypto wallet.
Kulikowski told him that to withdraw the funds he needed to become an “accredited investor”. The only way to do, this she said, was to have invested a total $1 million of his own money.
By then the professor had exhausted his savings. His scammers advised him to secure the required money by any means necessary, including a bank loan.
“I told them: ‘This can’t be happening. There must be another way.’ They said there wasn’t any other way,” he said.
In May, he applied for a loan from his bank for €75,000, with Kulikowski advising him to tell the bank it was for home improvements.
“I thought they were going to say: ‘But you can’t have a bank loan at your age.’ But then on the Thursday I got this message from them saying your bank loan is approved,” he said.
He handed over the money to Glenstone Advisory but found he was still unable to withdraw his investments. The professor’s growing concerns led him to seek advice from financial experts in Ireland and abroad.
[ The Irish Times view on investment fraud: just the latest online scamOpens in new window ]
Some, he says, never replied; others advised him that the scheme sounded highly suspicious.
In June, as the scammers continued to pressure him to invest even more money, the professor finally went to his local Garda station in Dublin. He spoke to a garda who agreed to look into Glenstone Advisory while the professor waited in the lobby.
A short time later, the garda returned and told the professor that the company looked legitimate. He asked the professor to consider if he had perhaps just been a victim of “bad advice” rather than fraud, he recalled.
“So I went home and said he’s probably right. I haven’t got a case here,” he said.
The professor went on to invest another €113,000 with the scammers as he tried to retrieve his investment, records show.
In late August, the professor received what sounded like good news. Kulikowski rang him via WhatsApp, saying he could now withdraw some of his earnings.
They could start the process after the weekend, when Glenstone’s “technical managers” are back in the office, Kulikowski told him on Friday, August 29th.
This was the last time he spoke to Kulikowski.
From this point on, “silence descended”, the professor recalled. Over the following weeks, in dozens of texts and emails, he pleaded with Kulikowski, or anyone at Glenstone, to call him back. He needed the money to make payments on the bank loan, which was costing him more than €2,000 a month, he explained.
Initially, he received a few messages from “Ellie” who claimed to be Kulikowski’s assistant, saying that she would contact him shortly. Soon, these stopped too. His last contact with anyone involved in the operation was September 8th last when a message from Kulikowski’s number read: “Erica will be gone for a week.”
Thereafter, the professor’s messages back grew increasingly panicked.
“Am I being punished for something? Is Glenstone Advisory in trouble? Am I definitively abandoned?” he wrote on September 21st after they cut contact with him.
The origins of Glenstone Advisory remain a mystery. Its website was set up in September 2024, the same time the professor first came into contact with the company.
It is not registered as a legitimate company with the Swiss authorities. However, its listed address is the same as two other companies with similar names: Glenstone Advisory and Capital AG, and Glenstone Capital IV.
Glenstone Advisory and Capital AG has been in business since 2017 and is properly registered with the Swiss authorities. It has a bare-bones website featuring a prominent warning that it is not involved in financial services.
There is no evidence of a link between Glenstone Advisory and the other legitimately registered Glenstones. It is not uncommon for fraudulent operations to clone legitimate businesses and use their addresses.
Attempts to contact Kulikowski and Glenstone Advisory on various numbers and email addresses this week were unsuccessful. Some phone numbers rang out; others were out of service. Queries to Glenstone Advisory and Capital AG also went unanswered.
The professor has now lodged a formal complaint with the Garda, who, he says, are taking it seriously.
“Investigations are ongoing at this time,” a spokesman said.
Garda sources confirmed they were investigating a large-scale scam operation involving a purportedly Swiss company, as described by the professor.
When he first spoke to The Irish Times in October, the professor believed he had some chance of retrieving some of his money.
A month on, he has adjusted his expectations.
“Essentially, it’s gone. I know there’s a small chance of some of it being recovered,” he said. “But essentially, I’ve got to live without it.”
Asked how he is coping with the stress, he said: “Physically, I’m doing great. Emotionally, I’m shattered”.
* Co-author of this report Mei-Ling McNamara is the editorial director of Investigate Europe. The article is part of the Scam Europe/Ireland series between The Irish Times and Investigate Europe, a cross-border journalism co-operative
