When I arrived in the United Kingdom, I came with hope. I had spent years as a refugee in a camp in a poor country, and like any parent, all I could see ahead of me was a better future for my family. I arrived with my wife and our young son, who was just one year and eight months old, and my wife was pregnant with our daughter. We were starting a completely new life.
It was harder than I had imagined. Back home I had completed two years of university, but here I had to begin again from nothing. The system was different, and even the language was different — I had studied in French, and now I had to learn English while caring for a small child and a pregnant wife. I found it difficult to follow English speakers' accents, and everything felt like a struggle: my studies, finding work, the weather, and the constant worry for the family I had left behind. But we kept going.
By 2020 we had our second child, both still very young, and then the COVID-19 pandemic arrived. Work was scarce, people were afraid, and money was tight. It was during this time that a friend told me about an opportunity to make money online by investing in cryptocurrency and Bitcoin. I was still new to the country. I did a little research but, not understanding how these schemes worked, I had no idea I was looking at fraudsters using multi-level marketing tactics to trap people.
At first it seemed real. I invested a small amount — some of the little we received in government support, as I was not working at the time — into schemes such as the ones being promoted to me. For the first three months it worked: I could invest and withdraw, and we were making money. We believed we had finally found a way out of poverty.
It was a trap. Believing it was a real business, I made the worst financial decision of my life. I put in around £20,000 — some of my own money, some borrowed from the bank, and some that was not even mine — convinced I would repay everything within a few months and lift my family out of hardship. Then the withdrawals stopped. The companies claimed "technical issues," blamed COVID, and told us to wait. We watched our balances grow on the screen, but we could take nothing out. By the end of 2020 I knew the truth: it was gone.
As I searched desperately for a solution, I found online reports confirming that these were all scams — and then I found what looked like a law firm that helped people recover money lost to fraud. They called me, listened, and promised they could recover my money and even win me compensation worth hundreds of thousands of pounds. I did not know that this was a second, more elaborate scam. Working as a team of three fake companies — a "law firm," a European "government scheme," and a "cybersecurity specialist" — they called from different numbers, sent forms to fill in, and assigned different people to my "case." In total I paid them almost £15,000, borrowing again and promising friends interest, certain I would win. When the promised day came, there was nothing. I had been scammed twice.
The pressure was crushing. COVID was everywhere, my wife was pregnant with our third child, and our debts, with interest, had grown to more than £49,000. I asked friends, my community and Citizens Advice; I reported it to Action Fraud and to the bank, and submitted complaints everywhere I could. Nothing brought the money back. My wife began to fall ill, in and out of hospital almost every month, and we had no family here to help us. I carried everything alone — working more than five days a week just to keep us from becoming homeless. There were moments when I did not know how I would survive; it was my faith and my family that carried me through. It took nearly two years before we could even begin to recover.
I do not share this to dwell on the pain, but because it became my purpose. After four years of living through it, I came to understand deeply how fraud destroys ordinary families — especially those who are new to a country, who do not yet speak the language well, and who are excluded from the digital world. So I decided to turn my experience into something good. I studied for my Level 3 qualification in Cybersecurity and went to university to study Digital Marketing, so that I could give my community the knowledge I once lacked.
That is the reason behind FBM Empower Foundation. We exist so that no one in our community has to face what I faced alone — so that people who face language barriers and digital exclusion can learn to use technology safely, protect themselves from fraud, build their skills, and find their footing in a new life. If my story can spare even one family the suffering mine endured, then everything I went through will have been worth it.
— Felix Bizimana Mugabe, Founder & Lead Trustee