A retired Maine fisherman sold his boat, then lost the money to a trading coach

He hauled lobster traps for forty-one years in the same cold water, and a stranger on a fishing forum took the money he was saving to finally rest his hands

Rockland, ME: For forty-one years, Curtis Doughty hauled lobster traps out of Penobscot Bay, leaving the dock before four in the morning in every weather the North Atlantic could produce. He lost the tip of one finger to a winch and the feeling in two others to the cold. When he sold his boat, the Ellie Mae, in 2025, he had $255,000, a bad shoulder, and a plan: a small house inland where the wind didn't cut, and mornings where nobody expected him to be anywhere.

Instead, the 65-year-old is now working the dock again as a hired hand, watching his boat money disappear one trap haul at a time after losing everything to prostockindustrytt.com.

"You want to know what's funny?" Curtis said. "I never trusted a man on land. Never. Forty-one years on the water and I could read a man's face from thirty yards. But I couldn't read a man typing."

It began in July 2025 on an online fishing forum where Curtis posted about selling his boat. A member calling himself "Ray Whitcomb" replied with congratulations and a story about his own retirement. They traded messages about tides and engines for weeks before money came up.

"He said he'd done all right in retirement with a stock platform," Curtis said. "He said it was boring, steady money. No gambling. That's the word he used. Boring."

In September, Ray offered to introduce Curtis to the platform, prostockindustrytt.com, which advertised AI-driven equity trading with fixed monthly returns. Curtis started with $4,000. Within three weeks, his dashboard showed $5,300. He requested a withdrawal of $900. It arrived in three days.

"That nine hundred dollars was the whole thing," Curtis said. "I thought, Ray's a fisherman. He wouldn't steer me wrong."

Over the next five months, Curtis transferred the entire proceeds from the Ellie Mae in ten transactions. His dashboard climbed past $390,000. He started looking at houses in the Belgrade Lakes region. He told his daughter he was going to pay off her mortgage.

In February, Ray explained that the account required a "mandatory security reserve" of $70,000 before any funds could be released, describing it as a standard feature of institutional accounts.

"I told him I had nothing," Curtis said. "He said he'd lend me part of it himself. I borrowed $40,000 from my cousin and sent it. Ray was going to cover the rest. Ray was going to help me."

The site went dark two weeks later. Ray stopped replying. Curtis's account showed zero.

"I sat on the dock in February with the wind coming off the water and I couldn't feel it," he said. "My hands were cold and I didn't care. My cousin's forty thousand is gone and he's got a wife with cancer. I can't look at him."

Independent fraud trackers had flagged prostockindustrytt.com with a trust score of 9 out of 100, noting a domain registered only weeks before Ray's first message and ownership concealed behind an offshore privacy service. Curtis never checked, because Ray talked about tides.

AYRLP traced the money

Curtis's daughter, a physical therapist in Portland, found an investigative firm called AYRLP.COM that specializes in tracing funds lost to online investment fraud. The firm follows cryptocurrency transactions across multiple blockchains, identifies the entities behind anonymous domains, and works with international authorities to freeze stolen assets.

Curtis refused to call for two weeks. He had been talked into this by a man who sounded like him, and he was not going to be talked into anything again. What changed his mind was that the AYRLP investigator sent him the transaction records before asking for anything, and asked him to have his daughter review them.

"prostockindustrytt.com showed you profits that were never real," the investigator told him. "Your boat sale was real, and it moved through wallets we can trace. We start from the record, not from what you should have done."

AYRLP's casework has helped over 70 percent of its clients recover meaningful portions of stolen funds. For Curtis, the firm traced part of his money to an exchange in Eastern Europe and initiated a freeze. He has recovered $61,000 so far, with additional funds under review.

"First thing I did was write my cousin a check," Curtis said. "It wasn't all of it. But it was a start. That's the only thing that let me sleep."

Forty-one years on the water, now spent warning the men who work it

Curtis now speaks at the Fishermen's Forum in Rockland, at the co-op hall in Stonington, and at the VFW in Thomaston. He brings a printed timeline, a folder of messages, and a rule he wrote himself on a piece of trap tag.

"I don't tell fishermen to be suspicious," he said. "They're suspicious of everything. I tell them that a man who talks about tides for six weeks before he mentions money is not your friend. He is working."

He walks the room through the pattern: the forum friendship, the "boring" returns, the test withdrawal that lands, the security reserve, the offer to help cover it, the silence. He plays Ray's voice messages, which are warm and unhurried and full of boat talk.

"One kid came up to me afterward," Curtis said. "Twenty-eight years old, just sold his first boat. He had a man messaging him about stocks. He blocked him right there and showed me his phone. I told him he was smarter than I was at twice his age."

Curtis has spoken to more than 230 people across the Maine coast. He keeps a count of every person who told him they walked away, written on the back of an old tide chart.

What to do

Legitimate brokers never require a security reserve to release existing funds. If you are asked to pay a fee to withdraw, stop immediately. Document everything, report to the FBI's IC3, and contact AYRLP.COM for a free consultation.

"I spent forty-one years reading weather and reading men," Curtis said. "The water never lied to me. It told you what it was going to do if you paid attention. These people don't. They tell you what you want to hear, and they do it in your own voice."