Elderly Fraud in Favara: 20-Year-Old from Naples Reported

A twenty year old Napoli he was reported by the police for having defrauded an 86 year old pensioner Favara.

Posing as a marshal, he convinced the woman to hand over money and jewelry, claiming that his daughter had caused a serious accident.

A similar episode had occurred shortly before in Aragona, where a forty-year-old woman had been tricked with the same stratagem.

The usual modus operandi

An unscrupulous young man, pretending to be a panicked policeman, contacted her by telephone and told her the most terrible news: her daughter had been seriously injured in a car accident.

The man's trembling voice and agitated words instilled an atavistic fear in the woman's heart, making her lose all lucidity.

Without a moment's hesitation, the retired, blinded by terror for the fate of her daughter, made everything she had in the house available to the self-styled policeman: a sum of cash, several valuables passed down from generation to generation and even the ATM, the instrument through which the scammer withdrew a further sum.

Only after a few hours, when the fear began to dissipate and reason began to take over again, the woman tried to contact her daughter, discovering with horror that she had been the victim of a ruthless deception.

At that point, she had no choice but to turn to the police and report the incident.

Thanks to the military's thorough investigations, it was possible to identify the person responsible for this vile act: a twenty-year-old Neapolitan, skilled at manipulating other people's emotions to gain profit.

This episode, unfortunately, is not an isolated case. In recent weeks, in Aragona, another woman had been scammed with the same modus operandi, losing an even larger sum of money.