For 2 Years, Colorado Woman Thought She Was Buying $700,000 In Beautiful Gold, But it Was a Scam

People across Colorado get scrammed/conned all the time: romance scams, door-to-door sales scams, law enforcement scams. This scam covered two years of this woman's life and more, as she sought out the perpetrators, in India.

Many might say, "Well, what did she expect, dealing with persons in another country?" but these con artists were thorough. So thorough that the woman kept coming back for more. It's no wonder that she traveled to where they were, when she found out.

Colorado Woman Scammed Out of Nearly $1 Million in Fake Gold Purchases

In Vail there is a fine jewelry store, Lanae; in 2015, VailDaily.com did a story about a diamond trunk show the store was having; in the article, Cherish Nortje is noted as one of the co-owners of the store. This gives you some background as to how this scam happened.

In 2024, BreezyScroll.com picked up the story Cherish Nortje, had flown to a popular tourist destination in India, Jaipur, to meet face to face with the men who had conned her.

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Over two years, after meeting one of the men through Instagram, she purchased pieces of what she thought were gold jewelry. At an exhibition in America, however, she discovered the jewelry was cheap silver made to look like gold. $4 worth of silver, to be exact, according to BreezyScroll and police records.

RELATED: Colorado's Great Diamond Hoax of 1872

After discovering she'd been conned out of over $700,000, and having the means to do so, traveled to India to confront the father and son involved. After the men rebuffed her, she went to the police and the U.S. embassy for assistance.

While the man who falsified the documents of authenticity was indeed arrested, the father and son perpetrators were "on the lam," as of June of 2024.