Known to the French police services and established in Israel for several years, the Franco-Israeli Ilan Abraham Marco, suspected of having defrauded from Israel several hundred elderly people in France, for the damage of more than a million and a half of euros, was extradited this Wednesday, September 15.
This 41-year-old man was brought before a judge of the Specialized Interregional Jurisdiction (Jirs) of Paris, who indicted him for “organized gang scams, threats and extortion with order to fulfill a condition”.
He was remanded in custody.
He was arrested in November 2020 while playing volleyball on a beach in Tel Aviv, near his luxury residence.
On March 21, the Jerusalem District Court accepted his extradition as part of a joint investigation between police officers from the Astute Crime Suppression Squad (BRDA) and the Tel Aviv Fraud Control Police, in collaboration with Interpol.
Calls from alleged tax officers
A judicial investigation was opened in March 2020. The victims are retirees living in France who had already suffered fraud with false financial investments.
Ilan Abraham Marco and his team are suspected of having called them by phone posing as public officials, including tax officials, claiming irregularities in their tax declarations made after their bad investments.
"The suspect was using French PBX services and dedicated applications, so that the phone calls he made seemed to come from France," said the extradition judgment of the Jerusalem district court that Le Parisien - Today in France had recovered at the time.
Over the phone, crooks threatened their targets with legal action unless they paid a hefty fine or tax.
They used the official letterhead of the administrations concerned.
To force the hand of their interlocutors, they did not hesitate to call them back, this time pretending to be gendarmes, police or customs officers.
The pseudo-fine money was disappearing through a web of fake accounts and shadow companies based in France and in different countries.
Some 800,000 euros seized
"Aged elderly people have made payments to dozens of different bank accounts in France and throughout the European Union, including Italy, Portugal, Spain and Hungary," notes the extradition judgment.
At Ilan Abraham Marco's home, the Israeli police had seized in search the equivalent of 800,000 euros in cash in several currencies (dollars, shekels, euros) but also seven telephones. The expertise of the devices made it possible to recover the traces of the e-mail addresses of the victims as well as a handwritten document detailing the bank accounts and the names of the victims.
