The fake accident scams: fourteen arrests for 27 robberies, 400 thousand euro loot

The State Police of Vercelli has dismantled a criminal association aimed at committing fraud against elderly people. The police officers of the Vercelli Flying Squad, supported by the Flying Squads of Piedmont and Valle d’Aosta and with the coordination of the Central Operations Service, have executed 14 precautionary measures in prison ordered by the Public Prosecutor’s Office of Vercelli. The operation, called “Caronte”, directed by the deputy prosecutor Rosamaria Iera, has shed light on 27 fraud episodes believed to have been committed by the association in the provinces of Vercelli, Novara, Biella, Lodi, Alessandria, Pavia, Varese, Como, Milan and Monza. The criminals who ended up in the investigators’ net, most of whom are nomads of Polish nationality linked by kinship, will now have to answer for criminal association aimed at committing fraud against elderly people, impersonation and receiving stolen goods.

In the dozens of confirmed cases, the victims reported receiving a phone call from a member of the police force, a lawyer or even a family member, who reported a road accident, which in reality never occurred, in which a relative of the victim was involved; to avoid unfortunate consequences, judicial or health, for the relative involved, the self-styled professional claimed that it was necessary to urgently deliver them a large sum of money and, if the victim was not able to reach the requested sum, the scammers convinced them to hand over all the family jewels and gold in their possession. The investigation started in April last year also found that the overall damage of the stolen goods amounts to approximately 400 thousand euros between cash and valuables stolen from the victims of the scams.

The investigation revealed the absolute versatility and interchangeability of the alleged associates, who could act as both telephone operators called to deceive the elderly victims and as self-styled people in charge of collecting the valuables, sometimes describing themselves as members of the Carabinieri, as hospital workers, employees of a law firm or even as a close relative of the victim. Furthermore, the affiliation to the association of some Italian individuals dedicated to receiving stolen goods allowed the group to quickly make the jewels stolen from the victims disappear, just as some of the members of the criminal association were found to be the owners of over 150 vehicles, used from time to time by the group to strike in various provinces of Northern Italy without leaving traces of their passage.

In today’s operation, approximately 80 men from the Police Headquarters of Piedmont and Valle d’Aosta and the Crime Prevention Unit of Turin were employed. The arrested are, at the moment, only suspected of crime and their position will be definitively examined judicially only after the issuance of a final conviction.