Dollar-Desperate Venezuelans Get Defrauded on Internet

The retired Venezuelan teacher says he was so desperate for dollars that he wired his life savings to a front company posing as a Margarita Island inn. Almost four months later, all he has to show for it is a menacing e-mail.

The faceless operators of the website that the math teacher, who requested anonymity, and thousands of others relied on to buy dollars in the country’s increasingly perilous black market are nowhere to be found.