Cairo Montenotte – It was the Cairo police who intervened and saved her from the scam. It is an unusual story that involved a woman from Valbormide, the victim of an attempted deception by two women who pretended to be an African prince.
A dream come true, an unexpected stroke of luck, a blessing in times of crisis. This is what the fifty-year-old born in Savona, but resident in Valbormida, who was informed that she was the beneficiary of the inheritance of an African prince, must have thought. How and why the woman would be entitled to the bequest of a nobleman from a distant country was not explained.
What is certain is that someone convinced the woman that, to unlock the fabulous five-figure sum, it was necessary to advance the more modest, but certainly not negligible, sum of seventeen thousand euros.
This is one of the oldest scams, first carried out via ordinary mail and then via email, yet still effective. The woman, in fact, turned to the Cairo Montenotte police only after having carried out, over several months, a series of transfers on a “Money transfer” card in her name, but for which she had been convinced to give the codes to the mysterious estate curators. After each payment, obviously, the money was systematically diverted to dozens of current accounts in Italy and Africa.
However, precisely by following the trail of the money, the Savona soldiers managed to reconstruct the intricate network set up by the criminals, who turned out to be, at the end of the investigative activity in recent days, two women aged forty-four and fifty-five years old residing in as many regions of southern Italy.
Certainly the criminals did not act alone, as evidenced by the various sorting of the sums stolen through the scam. A more extensive and transnational network is hypothesized. However, they will be the ones who, if found guilty by the judicial authorities, will be the first to pay the legal consequences. The two were reported for the crimes of fraud, money laundering and aiding and abetting. An excellent investigative result which, however, does not provide any guarantee to the victim of being able to get her money back, in whole or even in part.
“Against similar scams, the only way to protect yourself is prudence and caution towards what seems too good to be true”, say the carabinieri.
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