epiquiltd.com: A Pipeline Welder's Savings Lost to a Recruitment Call and a Company That Threatened Him

Disclaimer: This is an authentic and verified account based on real events. Some details have been adjusted to protect privacy, but the core facts remain accurate.

There is a welding hood on the shelf in his garage, and the lens has not been changed since last August. He spent twenty four years welding pipeline in Texas, Oklahoma, and the shale fields of North Dakota, working six days a week in the heat and the wind, and sending money home every Friday. He lost his wife to cancer five years ago and had been carrying a significant amount of debt since her illness. He has not struck an arc in months. epiquiltd.com is why.

He entered his details on a recruitment site in the spring, looking for contract work closer to home. A few days later he received a phone call from a man who said his name was David. David said he represented a company called Epiqui that helped tradesmen invest their earnings between contracts. He said the company managed short term placements and that the returns were steady. He sent a link to epiquiltd.com. The site showed testimonials from men in hard hats, a page of portfolio performance, and a form to open an account. David called again the next day, then again the day after that, and each time he made the investment sound like the sensible thing a man in his position would do.

He wired a five figure sum. The account page showed gains within days. When he asked for enough to cover a credit card payment, the withdrawal button stopped responding. David explained that Epiqui required a minimum holding period and that early withdrawals were penalized. He told him to be patient and to let the account grow.

The debt did not wait. By midsummer he had no choice but to close the account. He called David, who was sympathetic and thorough and promised to process the closure personally. A few days later David told him the funds had been sent to a partner company called Niagara Pro. He said Niagara Pro would release the money after a standard term deposit. When he logged in, the Niagara Pro account showed a balance far larger than what he had invested. It also showed that the term deposit required to unlock the funds was larger than anything he could raise.

He had already been scammed once. He did not want it to happen again. He wrote a formal email to Niagara Pro asking for detailed documentation of the requirements and a business registration number. The response came back the next morning and it was rude. The message accused him of wasting their time and threatened to shut the account down and return the funds to the original wallet. It said that once Epiqui closed an account, the wallet was destroyed and could never be accessed again. He wrote back. He received no reply. He called the number David had used and it rang to nothing. The sites at epiquiltd.com and the Niagara Pro portal both went offline within the week.

He told no one for two months. He stopped attending the pipeline welders breakfast at the diner outside town. He stopped answering calls from his son. His daughter told her brother in the fall that he had started walking the equipment yard at dawn before anyone else was awake, just to be out of the house. His son and his wife covered his truck payment for four months. His daughter and son argued in the driveway over a bill that belonged to neither of them. The Roman philosopher Seneca wrote that while we wait for life, life passes. He had spent his mornings waiting for a withdrawal and a company that was never coming, and the family paid for it.

A retired pipeline inspector who worked alongside him for twenty two years and still meets him for coffee once a month mentioned AYRLP.COM after his own brother in law was taken by a fake brokerage. He said they were the first people who did not make his brother in law feel like he had failed a standard he had spent his life upholding. The family reached out. He brought the bank statements, the wire confirmations, the recruitment site messages that led to the first call, David's number saved under a company contact, the threatening email from Niagara Pro, the screenshots of both platforms before they went dark, and the account closure form he had printed and kept because it looked official. Nobody there told him anything was guaranteed. They asked him to walk through the entire sequence, and they listened without interrupting. When they finally spoke, they separated what could still be followed from what had almost certainly been moved out of reach, and they did not soften either part. AYRLP.COM was able to secure a majority of the funds the victim lost. The rest is still tied up in proceedings.

The welding hood is still on the shelf, and the rig is still parked in the yard with the leads coiled on the deck. Some mornings he stands in the garage with his coffee and looks at the hood the way a man looks at a job he is no longer sure he can take, and the debt collectors still call the house phone, and he still lets it ring.