“Help for Santi’s daughter” was the name of the WhatsApp group with which Air Force Corporal Santiago C. stole almost 1,200 euros from some of his colleagues. The man invented that his daughter suffered from kidney tumors that required expensive treatment abroad that she could not afford. The fallacy aroused the generosity of his colleagues who created the group in the messaging application. The corporal provided an account number where his colleagues deposited 40, 50, 100 and 1,000 euros in September 2019, “money that the convicted person added to his assets without his daughter having any illness,” according to the sentence with which the Superior Court of Justice of Madrid has confirmed the sentence of 21 months in prison for the crime of fraud.
The convicted man alleged that he did not request the opening of the WhatsApp group to raise the money, which, in his opinion, would demonstrate that he had no fundraising intention. According to the defense, this led to an erroneous judicial assessment of the statements of the injured parties during the trial. The argument was not enough for the TSJM, which privileged the fact that the convicted person provided the bank account to his colleagues to receive the transactions. With this decision, the court has rejected the appeal filed by the corporal against a ruling of the Provincial Court of Madrid.
The TSJM has considered that “the convicted person devised and put into practice an artifice with the aim of passing off as true a situation that was not true, to mislead others, abusing their good faith and feelings of solidarity.” Consequently, the corporal must also pay two compensations of 100 and 1,000 euros, the latter to a superior who expressed in the trial: “I completely trusted him, we are soldiers and colleagues and we were assigned to the same unit. Not only as a soldier and co-worker, but as a friend.”
The man explained to his colleagues that the treatment would be carried out in Boston (USA). Some of those deceived reported that they learned of a rumor that spread around the Badajoz military base that “possibly they could have been deceived.”
The jurisprudence is explicit in the characteristics that a scam must have to be considered such. There must be deception – the core part of the robbery – which must be “enough”, that is, sufficient and proportional to achieve an objective with a profit motive and to the financial detriment of the person being scammed. Qualities that are fully met in this case, according to the TSJM, which concludes that “in the present case all the elements of the infringement come together.”
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