“I’m a little nervous,” the Dublin-based diplomat told the man on the other end of the phone calling himself “Jonathan”.

“Nervous is good,” Jonathan replied, reassuring him. “It means new things are happening. It’s like having a baby.”

By this stage, the diplomat had spent several hours on the phone with Jonathan and was at ease in his company. They shared jokes and complaints about work.

“I’m so busy – it’s just delegation after delegation,” the diplomat complained during one call.

Jonathan first started calling in July 2023 after the diplomat clicked on an online advertisement offering a passive income through a new type of high-speed stock trading. He said he was from a company called Golden Currencies and based in the UK.

“I was assigned as your financial adviser and I’m here to help you make as much as you can,” he told him.

The diplomat started with a €250 investment and soon started seeing gains. On the Golden Currencies website he could see profit of €83.66 one day and €61.10 the next.

But he had no idea at this stage that he was dealing with a sophisticated investment scam operation and that this money was gone as soon as he handed it over.

Recordings of his calls with the scammer – obtained by The Irish Times as a result of a leak to journalists – show the diplomat to be personable and friendly.

Throughout more than 120 calls, the diplomat shares his weekend plans and news about his family. He appears to have some basic knowledge of trading in shares.

The diplomat’s phone number is recognisable on the records of the scamming operation as an Irish mobile number. The Irish Times has established that he lives on the southside of Dublin, is an Irish citizen and works for the embassy of an African country.

Soon after Jonathan was pushing him to invest more money.

But time was of the essence; the diplomat only had a small window to take advantage of market conditions, he was told.

Within a week he had handed over another €4,047. By the end of the month, he had given Jonathan €8,120. By December he had paid €31,058 in total.

Whenever making another investment, the diplomat was told to first transfer the money from his bank into a cryptocurrency wallet Jonathan had helped him set up.

Jonathan advised the diplomat he may get a call from his bank asking what all these payments were for. He should tell the bank they were payments to a personnel account card and that was none of their business.

“The banks are greedy, they just want the investment business themselves,” Jonathan said.

In return, Golden Currencies soon showed him huge returns. Whenever the diplomat logged into the company’s website, he saw the money in his account had grown by thousands. It was almost too good to be true.

Sometimes, during his many conversations with Jonathan and other Golden Currencies agents, the diplomat worried about meeting his next mortgage payment.

Jonathan advised him not to fret. The money he invested was completely insured.

On one occasion, when the diplomat did not have money for a fresh investment, Jonathan remotely logged on to his computer and helped him apply for a loan from Bank of Ireland.

Sometimes it was Jonathan who called; on other occasions it was a person named “Eric Hill” or “Lucas Hoffman”, though these were not their real names.

All three poured on the flattery: “You are t