For months they made her believe they were the agents of her favorite actor, Leonardo DiCaprio, writing to her on Instagram, hooking her up from the galaxy of pages dedicated to the actor. She promised her a meeting with the Oscar-winning star but promptly, once the bank transfer was made, they disappeared. To then reappear among the private messages of the social network with other names but with the same illusion: that of being able to see DiCaprio live. The victim of the scam is a 48-year-old woman who ended up paying up to 6,750 euros, in various tranches, until she decided to report everything to the Milan Prosecutor’s Office. The woman explained to investigators that she had been contacted while browsing the fan page of the actor. Evidently monitored by scammers, who wrote to her privately describing themselves for the first time as Rick Yorn, Leonardo DiCaprio’s “producer and agent”. First the messages, then the emails, finally the request: 470 dollars to “meet the actor at the Cannes resort during the Film Festival period”. The transfer is made to a bank in Austria, but is unsuccessful.
Different approaches and payments in cryptocurrencies
The woman was contacted again, by other Instagram pages and other unknown persons who pretended to be the actor’s “real managers”. She would therefore have been persuaded to «sign a contract with LBI Entertainment – a Californian agency that actually exists but is unrelated to the crimes, she reconstructs The day – for a two or three day meeting with Leonardo DiCaprio in Cannes, with room and board included.” “Included” in the request was $1,750, in cryptocurrencies, paid by the complainant. And then another 3 thousand dollars, in an English bank account and in cryptocurrencies, to obtain the card of the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation, created by the actor in 1998 to promote environmental protection projects, which would have allowed her to take part in parties and events with the ‘actor. The victim had now been hooked and she had the strength to report when the scammers had managed to take around 7 thousand euros from her. The European Arrest Warrant Observatory of the International Criminal Chambers is also dealing with the matter. «The matter is worrying», explains superintendent Alexandro Maria Tirelli, «but we hope that the European Union treaties will soon provide quicker tools to obtain preventive seizures of the money, often diverted first to the Baltic republics and then again to banks overseas».
