From the identikit to the reconstruction of the routes up to the timetables and the modus operandi: these were the steps of the investigations which in the last few hours led to the arrest of a 44-year-old of Florentine origin and resident in the Pistoia area seriously suspected of being the author of receiving stolen goods and improper use of credit and debit cards. According to the Livorno prosecutor’s office, he would in fact be responsible for numerous cash withdrawals from cards that were found to be stolen, all unduly taken from stolen bags in the car parks of some shopping centers in Livorno. Fraudulent conduct, in the period between March 2023 and April 2024, detected by the Carabinieri who, on the orders of the prosecutor’s office, then executed the precautionary measure, arresting the man during the night in an accommodation facility in Prato.
The investigations, explain the Carabinieri of Ardenza, were started following a series of thefts of bags containing personal effects, including bags and purses with credit and debit cards. The various events, meticulously reconstructed, start from 3 April 2023, when the suspect allegedly made five withdrawals and seven payments at various commercial establishments in Livorno with the credit cards of a lady who that same day had had her bag stolen from her car in a parking lot of a well-known shopping center in Livorno Sud after doing some shopping. The images from the cameras of a tobacco shop and an ATM device involved in the fraudulent operations did not initially allow the perpetrator to be identified and recognized, but this did not prevent the investigators from identifying him when those same images were compared with those relating to other offences.
Similarly, on 24 October 2023, another lady had been robbed of her purse in the car park of the same shopping centre, in a manner completely similar to the first episode. And again on 23 December 2023, the victims were a married couple robbed in a car park of another well-known Labronica shopping center (in this case, using the stolen card, a withdrawal of 250 euros was made from the post office ATM, whose video surveillance would have returned useful elements in relation to the perpetrator of previous crimes). Lastly, the episode of last March 5th: another woman, after transferring the shopping bags to the car, had her bag stolen containing, among other things, the credit cards from which they had been approximately two thousand euros were subsequently withdrawn.
From the details provided by the Carabinieri to the Livorno Prosecutor’s Office, in which all the circumstantial elements were consistent against the man, the elements therefore emerged for which the judge for preliminary investigations of the Livorno court issued a restrictive precautionary measure in prison , considering the risk of repetition of the crime to be well founded.
