«Ma’am, your son caused a car accident. the police stopped him and he is currently in court. I am the lawyer who has to defend him but money is needed.” With this plot one of the scammers stopped yesterday in Naplesin Market area, would have, together with his accomplices, tried to get money or jewels delivered by a seventy-two-year-old Sicilian by contacting her by telephone. The scammers had passed themselves off as fake lawyers and fake policemen, staging the story of a fake road accident to leverage the emotional chords of the victim and convince them to hand over money or valuables. «We need money, ma’am. But if you don’t have any available at the moment, jewels are fine too.”
The scammers
They, the would-be scammers, were in a small apartment on the fourth floor of Vico Parrettari, one of the alleys between Piazza Mercato and Corso Umberto in Naples. She, the victim contacted by chance during the dozens of trawling phone calls made by fishing for telephone numbers from the White Pages, was in her house in Militello Rosmarino, a small town in the province of Messina. The woman listened to what the fake lawyer and the fake police were telling her, she was worried but at the same time unsure whether or not to believe those words of hers. Until the phone call was interrupted by the arrival, in the Neapolitan house of the three, of the real carabinieri who had spied on the conversation from the landing and caught the would-be scammers in the act.
The three suspects are now under house arrest. It’s about Saverio Ianniello, Domenico De Martino and Roberto Messina, three men living not far from the place of the arrest. They must answer for attempted fraud. The carabinieri (the real ones) on duty at the Borgoloreto station and the Stella operations unit arrived to them starting from the report of an anomalous coming and going of people in the apartment on the fourth floor of vico Parrettari.
That apartment, in fact, should have been uninhabited and the fact that recently there were people going in and out of there aroused the first suspicions. The rest was reconstructed by the investigations of the carabinieri who collected information and carried out stakeouts, finally managing to foil the scam.
The victims
The fact that the three had identified a victim in Sicily suggests the hypothesis of an accomplice present on site who would probably have been given the task of withdrawing the money once the victim had been convinced. Investigations continue on this and other aspects. At the time it emerged that the three suspects had set up a real call center inside the house dedicated to scams targeting the elderly. In the apartment, ten mobile phones of various types were found and seized, a small notebook with notes and details relating to the scam plots, 4 intact SIM cards and one cut in two and thrown from the window at the time of the police raid. Also seized was a gram of marijuana and the sum of 1600 euros in 50 and 100 euro notes.
The blitz
To enter the apartment, the carabinieri from the Stella company and the Borgoloreto station acted cunningly. They remained in position for the time necessary to collect the final evidence and listen to the three’s conversations on the phone with the seventy-two-year-old victim. When they decided the time had come to intervene and stop the three, they knocked on the door of their house. They were in civilian clothes and posed as condominium residents annoyed by the stench of marijuana coming through the windows. From inside the house someone grumbled and protested loudly, but in the end he was convinced to open up and clarify the matter.
He found himself faced with the police who proceeded with the arrests and the seizure of money, cell phones and marijuana. There are never too many recommendations in these cases. On the sidelines of the arrests, the police gave some advice to avoid scams. Here they are: «Never share your personal and financial information over the phone, especially with strangers. If you are about to make an important decision, talk to people you trust. If you think you have been approached by a scammer or are a victim of a scam, contact 112 immediately.”
© ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Read the full article at
The morning
