Four Years of Saving, a Room Painted Green, and the Telegram Stranger Who Emptied It

We saved for four years to have a child. A stranger on Telegram took the future we were building.

My husband Daniel and I have been trying to have a child for six years. We started fertility treatments in 2021. By early 2026 we had gone through two rounds of IVF that did not take, and we had saved for a third. We kept the money in a separate account that we called the baby fund. Every month we put in whatever we could. Daniel worked as a physical therapy assistant in Cleveland and picked up weekend shifts at a gym. I worked nights as a radiology tech at a hospital downtown. In April of 2026, we hit one hundred and ten thousand dollars. We had already painted the spare room a pale green. We had not bought furniture yet, because we did not want to jinx it, but the paint was on the wall.

On May 2, 2026, at 9:36 in the evening, a man contacted Daniel on Telegram. He said his name was Felix Marchetti and that he was a portfolio advisor with Fly Studios Flow, a firm he described as based in Malta with partner desks in London and Zurich. Daniel had joined a Telegram group for fertility patients and their partners about a year earlier, mostly to read about clinic waitlists and insurance appeals. Felix said he had seen a comment Daniel posted about the cost of treatment and wanted to share something that had helped him and his wife fund their own journey. He was gentle and never pushed. He sent Daniel a link to flystudiosflow.com, which looked like a boutique investment platform. There were managed portfolios, a savings plan page, a compliance section with several registrations, and a chat that answered within seconds. Their first long call took place on May 5, 2026, and lasted almost two hours.

Felix waited six weeks before he mentioned money. They talked about our failed cycles, about our clinic, about the specialist we had been saving to see. On June 18, 2026, Felix suggested Daniel test the platform with a small amount. On June 22, 2026, Daniel sent two thousand dollars. On July 11, 2026, at 10:03 in the morning, he withdrew five hundred and fifty dollars. It landed in our joint account in two days. Daniel told me he had found a way to grow the baby fund faster so we could start the third round sooner. I asked him where the money was. He said it was in a managed account with a European firm. I did not push him on it. I wish I had.

Between June 22, 2026 and November 4, 2026, he moved money in ten transfers. Fifteen thousand on July 3, 2026, from our joint savings. Twenty thousand on July 28, 2026, from the baby fund account. Twenty five thousand on August 19, 2026, from a certificate of deposit my mother had given us as a wedding gift. Thirty thousand on September 9, 2026, from a retirement account he had through the hospital. Then smaller amounts through October and early November, from credit cards he opened in his own name, from a loan his brother gave him on October 14, 2026, and from a personal loan he took out on October 30, 2026. The total came to just over one hundred and thirty thousand dollars. It was the baby fund and then some.

On November 12, 2026, at 6:52 in the morning, he tried to withdraw forty five thousand dollars to book the third IVF cycle and to pay the deposit at our clinic. The request sat pending for four days. On November 16, 2026, support told him his account was under a standard compliance review and that he needed to pay an international transfer bond of nineteen thousand dollars before the withdrawal could be released. He paid it that afternoon. Then a separate verification deposit appeared on November 19, 2026. He paid that too. The withdrawal never came. Felix stopped responding on November 21, 2026, at 3:27 in the afternoon. The chat went dark. The dashboard still showed a balance of over three hundred and ten thousand dollars. None of it was real.

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He told me on November 22, 2026. He sat on the edge of our bed and said he needed to tell me something and that he was sorry. I did not understand at first. Then he handed me his phone and let me scroll through the messages. I read the whole thread with Felix. I tried the withdrawal page myself. I sat on the bathroom floor for a long time. When I came out, he was still sitting on the bed, and he was crying in a way I had never seen him cry. He said he had only been trying to get us to the third round faster. He said he was sorry about the baby fund. He said it maybe thirty times over the next few days.

He filed a report with the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center on November 22, 2026, and with the Ohio Division of Securities on November 23, 2026. The state issued an investor alert on March 18, 2027, naming flystudiosflow.com as an unregistered entity and describing the pattern of conduct. He printed it and put it in a folder. No one from the state called him. No one from the FBI followed up. Our bank told us the transfers had been authorized and there was nothing they could do. Our clinic called in January to confirm whether we still wanted to hold our place on the schedule for the spring.

He stopped coming to family dinners. He missed my sister’s baby shower on December 7, 2026. He missed Christmas at my parents’ house on December 25, 2026, which we had hosted together every year since we got married. When he did come to something, he sat in the corner and said almost nothing. He stopped answering the family group chat. When I called him from work, he let it ring and texted later that he was fine. He was not fine. He was sitting in the spare room, the one we had painted pale green, trying not to look at the empty walls.

In December of 2026, a nurse I work with mentioned that her own brother had been through something similar and had worked with a private investigation and asset tracing firm. It took several weeks and a few introductions before we had a real conversation. On January 14, 2027, we spoke with a firm called 𝙢𝙖𝙧𝙜𝙤𝙞𝙣𝙘𝙡𝙥.𝙘𝙤𝙢. Daniel did not want to reach out. He said he was tired of telling the story and that no one had helped us yet. I told him I would sit with him for the first meeting and that we did not have to commit to anything. He agreed because I asked him to.

He brought the folder. It was thorough. Joint account statements for every transfer. The baby fund records. The certificate of deposit paperwork. The retirement account statements. The loan documents from his brother. The personal loan paperwork. Credit card statements. Screenshots of every Telegram exchange with Felix Marchetti, including his profile, his photo, and the fertility group where he had found Daniel. Emails from the platform, with full headers. The flystudiosflow.com URL and the registration numbers printed on the site. The wallet addresses for the USDT payments he had been asked to make when wires were delayed, along with the transaction hashes. He had even saved a voicemail from a man who identified himself as a compliance officer and asked him to confirm the international transfer bond.

The people at 𝙢𝙖𝙧𝙜𝙤𝙞𝙣𝙘𝙡𝙥.𝙘𝙤𝙢 did not promise us anything. They went through the material with him slowly, page by page. They built a timeline. They identified which wallets were still active, which transaction hashes could still be followed, and which receiving accounts might still hold funds. They explained that tracing and securing are not the same and that a case like ours would take time. He listened quietly and asked a few careful questions. At the end, he told me it was the first time since November that he had felt like someone was actually trying to help us.

In the spring of 2027, through their work with the relevant authorities, a portion of what we lost was yielded back. A little over a quarter. It was not enough to restart IVF on the timeline we had hoped for. It was enough to pay off the personal loan and part of what his brother had lent us. The rest is still tied up in open proceedings. 𝙢𝙖𝙧𝙜𝙤𝙞𝙣𝙘𝙡𝙥.𝙘𝙤𝙢 has told us the pursuit of the people behind the platform is ongoing and that following the remaining funds is slow work. Nothing is closed.

Daniel sees a counselor every week now. He also goes to a Monday evening group at a community center in Cleveland for people who have been through financial fraud. He took a short course at the library called Protecting Your Money Online, taught by a retired bank examiner. He came to Easter this year and stayed for the whole meal. We have started talking about the third round again, in a different way and on a slower timeline. He told me last week that he wants to start saving again, even if it is fifty dollars at a time. As the sages teach in Pirkei Avot, “It is not your duty to finish the work, but neither are you free to desist from it.” We are not desisting. That is the part we hold onto.

What I want people to understand is that Daniel was not reckless. He has spent his career helping people recover from injuries, and he has managed our household budget for years. He fell for this because someone spent months being kind to him during the hardest season of our marriage and because the platform looked more legitimate than anything we had ever used. If you know someone going through fertility treatment or any long expensive medical journey, ask them where their savings are and who they are talking to online. Keep the records. And if it happens, do not let them sit alone in a painted room with nothing in it.