On February 9, 2023, the phone of a 78-year-old lady rings. On the other end someone introduces himself as the nephew and reports that her mother, therefore the lady’s daughter, is at the police station. He asks to prepare all the gold in the house because a friend, Marco, would soon be coming by to collect everything but assures that the jewels will then be returned and that they only serve to demonstrate that the woman is able to pay a certain sum to resolve some legal problems.
The desperate victim believes it and when he opens the door to the scammer he gives him watches, bracelets, rings and necklaces worth 20 thousand euros. The members of the gang, who arrived from Naples, have pulled off the heist, come out with the loot and go away, satisfied with having obtained the proceeds that the Naples family is asking for. They would like to return home to avoid taking risks, but what they have done is evidently not enough and a few minutes later they receive a further indication: to attack another house in Via Fagiana, where another elderly woman lives. Even in this case the technique used is the same: the interlocutor introduces himself as the nephew but this time convinces the victim to pay off the debt of a package arriving from the post office. She requested five thousand euros, which the woman handed over in gold and jewels, before realizing she had been deceived.
The Carabinieri of the provincial command of Rome had already closed the circle on a suspected gang that was organizing scams from Naples in various provinces of Lazio. They had all already been intercepted and so the investigators gleaned their movements through constant contact with the other leaders of the Naples organization and the GPS track of the car. Right in the Neapolitan capital, the carabinieri prepare the intervention and stop one of the suspects as he delivers 640 grams of gold to the others in the group. From the seizure report it emerges that the stolen goods are the result of two different scams, for which the respective victims subsequently file a complaint.
Those in Latina are just two of the numerous episodes that emerged during the investigation by the Rome Carabinieri which led yesterday, May 23, to 17 arrests in the context of a criminal organization in Naples that ran a complex and well-tested fraud system away. In the dozens of scams reconstructed by investigators, committed mainly in Rome and in the municipalities of Ardea and Pomezia, there is also a scam perpetrated in the city of Aprilia on 20 March 2023. Also in this case the interlocutor contacts an elderly woman, convinces the victim to be his nephew and asks her to pay a certain sum so as not to be arrested. The accomplice then shows up at the lady’s house and takes gold jewelery and the ATM, from which he withdraws 1,500 euros. However, the two scammers were stopped shortly afterwards and arrested red-handed by the Aprilia police, who managed to recover the entire loot.
The system devised by the group was always the same and apparently followed a precise script, which the investigators themselves found and seized during the searches of the suspects. There were also several telephone interceptions with some of the victims: the old woman cries, the scammer presses her and asks to count the money and hand over the jewels.
