A 16-year-old was stopped on board a train headed to Naples by the Rome railway police, alerted by the policemen of the Padua Flying Squad. The boy, just a few hours earlier, had defrauded an 84-year-old elderly woman in Padua.
During the morning, the young man had shown up at the woman’s house pretending to be a lawyer, after she had been contacted by telephone by an elusive policeman who invited her to hand over money and jewels to avoid prison for her son, falsely accused of having caused an accident.
The elderly woman gave the scammer all her valuables, around 50 thousand euros, but then called the police. The policemen of the Padua Flying Squad, knowing well the modus operandi of commuter fraudsters, identified the young man thanks to the images of the video surveillance cameras of the city’s railway station and promptly notified the Rome railway police who blocked him on the train return.
The 16-year-old who already had a history of property crimes and was reported for fraud.
The stolen goods were entirely recovered by the officers and returned to the victim’s son.
The invitation is to also pay attention to the signals preceding the coup; in fact, it has been found that scammers identify their potential victims through the list of landline subscribers, the latter are contacted several times already in the weeks preceding the actual scam attempt, and with various excuses they steal various information, such as names of children or grandchildren, the work they do and everything that is useful to complete their purpose.
The State Police, in addition to implementing enforcement activities for this type of crime, continues its commitment to prevention campaigns so that there is greater awareness of the techniques most commonly used by fraudsters.
Consult the page dedicated to the most common scams.
