This week on the perfect scam.

She noticed these payments, these transfers to something called coin base.

And there were dozens and dozens and dozens of them,

hundreds of hundreds of dollars

with the transfers to Coinbase.

And she saw that his bank account

had been drawn down to next to nothing.

Welcome back to the perfect scam. I'm your host Bob Sullivan. And let me say up front that I will struggle to get through today's story without choking up a bit. I hope you'll forgive me. Matthew West was diagnosed with a rare

and fatal form of brain cancer four years ago, but the disease took a turn for the

worse this fall. Partially paralyzed, suffering from brain fog and in a great deal of pain he went

looking for relief online and on the other end of the keyboard the worst kind of internet criminals were looking for someone just like Matt.

His older brother Justin, so close to Matt that Mom calls him Matt's second mom,

is a perfect scam, longtime listener,

and he reached out to me to talk about the family ordeal on LinkedIn recently,

which I encourage any of you to do.

Justin wanted to share his story because he feels it's just so important that people know how far criminals will go, how low they will go, to find vulnerable people.

And I do too. Here's what happened to Matt when he went

looking online for help during his darkest hours. And what can happen in the

dark web? My name is Justin West. I'm a plastic surgeon. I was born in California.

I have one brother Matthew West who's my younger brother. My father Jan and John. My father was a surgeon. My mother was a nurse, my brother is about two and a half years younger, so we were very close growing up,

grew up in Southern California, went to college in Southern California, and then ultimately ended up going to the East Coast for medical school.

When I talked with Justin, he was surrounded by packing boxes.

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