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Seven men were sent to trial by prosecutors from the Bucharest 2nd District Court Prosecutor’s Office, accused of defrauding several elderly people, through the “Accident method, which has become the” COVID method. Similar crimes .
According to a statement sent this Tuesday by the Prosecutor’s Office of the 2nd District Court of Bucharest, the prosecutors sent to trial, in a state of preventive detention, seven men investigated for continuous fraud and complicity in continuous fraud. Two of them are being held in the same cell in a maximum security prison in Bucharest and they are friends, and they are also being investigated and tried for similar crimes of deception.
Prosecutors say the disbanded group specialized in COVID fraud, the old “accident” method, “adapting the perpetrators to the social realities generated by the novel SARS-COV2 coronavirus pandemic.”
According to the Prosecutor’s Office, two of the defendants were prosecuted for fraud by the “accident method” in 2018, one as a perpetrator, being a prisoner in the penitentiary, and the other as an accomplice, being a fugitive. criminal charges for complicity in attempted fraud.
How the group acted
The imprisoned defendants, using a small mobile phone, randomly dialed (ascending order) calls from the fixed terminals and told the victims that they were their son / daughter, grandson or nieces (adapted according to the interlocutor), and they were diagnosed with Covid -19 and is hospitalized in an infectious disease hospital.
The victims were told that their health was very serious, with a large proportion of their lungs affected, and the only way to stay alive was to connect to a ventilation device, except that the medical unit did not have a device. to which you are connected or could connect only after a long period of time.
The victims were then presented with a “solution”: to buy the necessary ventilation equipment, which costs between 6,000 and 15,000 euros. The criminals asked the victims to tell them what money they had (savings, funeral money, jewelry, money from bank accounts) and how much they could give. To more easily obtain the sums of money, the offender told the victims, most of them over 70 years of age, that he too had a sum of money and needed another part, as well as that the sum of money that represented the equivalent value of the Medical device will be recovered from the health insurance company, creating for them the appearance of recovering the amount of money to be offered.
In addition, if the victim had a larger sum of money (he renounced to continue the process of effectively obtaining the sums of money when the victim had amounts less than about 1,000 euros), the conversation would go to another defendant, which is recommended that the employee of the health insurance company / medical staff and, under the pretext of entering into a contract with the health insurance company for the purchase of the medical device, obtain from the injured person the identification data, as well as their address .
The victim’s address was later texted to a general defendant, who was addressing the injured person to collect the money. While the accomplices went to the home, the victim stayed on the phone, and in case they were late, they asked him, to take time out, to dictate the series of tickets.
A defendant had the function of keeping in touch with the perpetrators in the penitentiary center, so, every morning, he wondered if they started or continued criminal activity, sending them text messages about it. Likewise, for a milder success, but above all due to its lesser exposure, it involved several accomplices in the criminal activity, who actually went to the door of the victim’s house, while two defendants watched the area.
The perpetrators of the crimes, transferred by taxi to the victims
Also, to ensure a quick trip to the addresses, a taxi driver was involved, who occasionally transported them or was ready to transport his accomplices to the addresses where he would collect the money.
