A 27-year-old man will spend up to six years in prison after stealing over $120,000 from an 80-year-old Highlands Ranch woman in a gold bar scheme.

A 23rd Judicial District judge Victoria Klingensmith sentenced Sagar Jayeshkuma Patel of New Jersey to six years in prison on felony theft charges on Friday. He was also ordered to pay around $144,000 in restitution, according to a press release from the 23rd Judicial District Attorney’s Office.

Patel is also under investigation for similar crimes in New York and Delaware.

The scam occurred in July 2023 when Patel targeted a then 79-year-old woman referred to as Charlotte. 

The woman received a popup on her computer that said she had a virus and needed to call an 888 number. Once called, Patel identified himself as a federal agent and said her bank account had been compromised.

Patel convinced the woman to buy two gold bars worth over $63,000 and give them to him at a convenience store in Littleton, continuing the guise that he was a federal agent and that the woman should not contact any other law enforcement.

The suspect allegedly attempted to get more financial information from her after the exchange, but the victim called her bank and they informed her to cut communication.

Charlotte recorded Patel’s license plate number and reported it over to the Douglas County Sheriff’s Office. Detectives eventually caught Patel through cellphone records, credit card records and surveillance footage. He was extradited from New Jersey.

The gold was never found.

Patel is an undocumented immigrant with a hold on him from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), according to the release.

“While no sentence can undo what happened to my mother, this conviction brings a small sense of justice and closure for the family,” Charlotte’s son, William Wilcox, said at the sentencing.

A 2021 study by the Federal Trade Commission found that people 70-and-older were less likely to report fraud than younger victims, but also experience larger financial losses.

The most used method for contacting and scamming victims 60-and-older was phone calls in 24% of cases and websites or apps in 21%. 

In a press conference regarding scams in February 2024, Douglas County Sheriff Darren Weekly said that only around 1% of these cases usually end in arrests due to the complexity of the situation and schemes.

“If you come to Douglas County to scam senior citizens out of gold bars, you can expect to be behind prison bars,” Deputy District Attorney Joe Ratner said in the press release.