A New York man is accused of milking a Newton senior citizen out of nearly half a million dollars through an elaborate scam allegedly involving narcotics, the DEA, the FBI and the U.S. Treasury Department.

Vishual Kumar, 23, of Queens, New York, appeared in Middlesex Superior Court and was formally charged with extortion, larceny over $250 from a person over 60, and conspiracy. He’s accused of extorting and defrauding a 72-year-old Newton woman out of more than $480,000.

Kumar was ordered held in jail in lieu of $500,000 cash bail ahead of his next hearing date of April 2.

Middlesex District Attorney Marian Ryan said the scheme “illustrates several common aspects of these financial scams.”

“The defendant and his alleged co-conspirators used multiple points of contact to build trust, they posed as official government agents, assigned a ‘case worker’ in an effort to appear helpful to the victim and even created fake documents to serve as receipts,” she said.

Prosecutors say Kumar contacted the woman last December under the pretense that he was a Drug Enforcement Administration agent investigating a case in which narcotics traffickers had opened nearly two dozen bank accounts in her name.

The woman was told that she was responsible for the $2 million in those accounts being used in illegal drug transactions.

The woman was told that to stop the identity theft, she would have to transfer all her assets to the U.S. Treasury and that she would then be issued a new Social Security number and have the assets returned to her, according to prosecutors.

But the alleged DEA agents proposed a funky way of transferring those assets: the woman was to purchase gold bars and hand the bars off to a number of couriers over a month.

The woman, fearful of the threat that the FBI would arrest her, prosecutors say, followed the instructions and liquidated hundreds of thousands of dollars from her retirement savings to buy gold bars and then handed the bars over to the bagmen.

The woman’s family learned of the scheme and reported it. Prosecutors say Kumar was caught when a real FBI agent went undercover to deliver the latest round of gold bars.

“These scams thrive in secrecy,” DA Ryan said. “Fortunately, in this case, the victim and her family were able to enlist the help of law enforcement within a fairly short period of time which put a stop to this exploitation but not before the victim suffered a staggering loss of nearly half a million dollars.”