Following a detailed investigation, the Flying Squad of the Parma Police Headquarters managed to identify the perpetrators – two young residents in the Neapolitan hinterland aged 26 and 22 – of a scam carried out against an elderly fellow citizen through the technical note of the “fake accident to the son”
In detail, Flying Squad personnel intervened in the home of an eighty-eight-year-old lady where her son had just realized that his mother had been deceived and induced to hand over all the money, jewels and ATM card to a self-styled lawyer, agent of a phantom Marshal of the Carabinieri: the latter had telephoned her saying that her son was in the barracks because he had been involved in a road accident during which a woman had been hit and she needed to be compensated to avoid consequences. Without doubting the genuineness of the request, the old woman had thus obeyed. Only with the arrival of her son did she discover that she had been deceived.
The immediate intervention of the State Police made it possible, however, to trace a fraudulent withdrawal from the victim’s current account made at an ATM and, thus, crystallize the image of the fraudster immortalized by the institute’s video surveillance system of credit. Subsequent investigations made it possible to identify the vehicle used by the two fraudsters, allowing all their movements to be reconstructed.
By viewing the images extrapolated from public and private video surveillance systems, investigators identified the other accomplice. The timely investigative activity was finally sealed by the victim’s recognition of the person identified by the Police as the self-styled lawyer who had shown up at the door to collect the valuables to “free” his son. At the end of the investigations, the two fraudsters were reported at liberty to the local Public Prosecutor’s Office for the crime of aggravated fraud in competition. Investigations are underway to verify whether the couple is responsible for further, similar episodes.
