The family of a missing Brooklyn woman says someone is using her phone to demand bitcoin after she vanished in Las Vegas.
Alisa Goods, 63, was reported missing on August 10 after leaving her friend’s apartment near the Las Vegas Strip on August 8 to walk to a CVS pharmacy, her niece Alana Calloway told Fox 8. Goods had been visiting Roger John, a friend of nine years whom she regularly stayed with during trips to Sin City.
“This is not like her to just go missing,” Calloway said. “She has a family that loves her, cares about her. We want her home and want her home safe and alive.”
John told the outlet this was Goods’ second visit to see him this year. He said the last time he saw her was around 12:45 p.m. When she left his apartment to catch a bus to the pharmacy. He departed shortly after and returned two to three hours later to find she had not come back.
“And I was like, ‘She should have been home already.’ I didn’t think much of it, because sometimes she’d go out and she’d shop, she stays out. And I kept texting and calling and texting and calling,” John said.
Both John and Goods’ family said her cell phone had been disconnected and was not working in the immediate aftermath of her disappearance. That changed on August 12, two days after she was officially reported missing, when the phone suddenly began sending text messages to family members.
Calloway described her first exchange with whoever was operating the phone. “I said, ‘Hey, could you call me back? Something happened to mommy. It’s an emergency.’ And I kind of went on and on trying to get the person to actually call me. But they kept putting it off and saying, ‘Now my card’s not working,'” she told the outlet.
The person on the other end claimed to be stranded at a gas station with credit card trouble, a detail Calloway found immediately suspicious because Goods did not have a car with her in Las Vegas. Calloway pressed further, trying to determine if she was actually speaking with her aunt.
“I said, ‘Well, okay, I can send you money for gas. How much do you want me to send you?'” Calloway recounted. “Then they wanted the bitcoin. And then I said, ‘Well, hold on. Let me get Kelly to help.’ We have nobody in our family named Kelly.”
She said she believes Goods would have questioned who Kelly was had she been the one receiving the texts. “That was alarming,” Calloway said. “Every time the person texts back, it just felt like my heart was in my stomach because I knew it wasn’t my aunt.”
Goods’ son, Keven Newton, also began receiving strange messages seeking cash shortly after Calloway’s exchange. The family has now been searching for Goods for more than a week, reaching out to hospitals, the coroner’s office and local jails in their desperate hunt for answers.
Calloway said the Las Vegas Metro Police told her Goods “did not meet the qualifications of a priority” because she did not have a disability, leaving the family to conduct much of the search effort themselves. John has started putting up missing person flyers around the area where she disappeared.
“It’s just sad because she’s the nicest person you would meet,” John said of his missing friend. “It’s just really weird to me. It just feels like it’s not happening. I see this all the time and you never really think this could happen to me. And now it’s happened to me and it’s just so strange.”
Newton directed an emotional plea toward whoever may have his mother. “Just give my mother back. I don’t know what y’all got going on, but this ain’t it,” he said.
In the viral moment that first drew attention to the case, Calloway made a public appeal for any information that could help locate her aunt. “This is our plea and our cry: if anybody has seen anything, it can be the smallest thing. It can be something that they think does not matter; we ask that you just report it,” she said. The family continues to coordinate search efforts while waiting for any new leads from the mysterious text messages or potential sightings in the Las Vegas area.
The Las Vegas Metro Police Department has not announced any new developments in the search for Goods as of this week.