As of: March 17, 2024, 3:19 p.m
By: Fabian Hartmann
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A senior citizen from Baden-Württemberg suffered enormous damage due to fraud.
The criminals posed as prosecutors - and acted ice-cold.
Ketsch – An 84-year-old man from Ketsch in the Rhine-Neckar district of Baden-Württemberg has fallen victim to a particularly bold scam by two fraudsters.
The damage caused is enormous and runs into tens of thousands of euros.
As the
German Press Agency
(dpa) reports, two men are said to have pretended to be prosecutors on the phone to the 84-year-old pensioner.
During the telephone conversation, they informed the senior citizen that his son had been the cause of a fatal car accident.
Now the son urgently needs money for bail, the police authority responsible for the case announced on Sunday.
The amount demanded by the false public prosecutors is said to have been 72,000 euros.
Pensioners beware: fraudsters with a nasty scam – “Dad, I caused an accident”
The 84-year-old pensioner heard a tearful male voice during the telephone conversation.
She repeatedly shouted “Dad, I caused an accident”.
Senior receives a call from “Anonymous” © IMAGO/Fotostand / K. Schmitt
The information provided in the telephone conversation therefore seemed plausible to the senior citizen.
He handed over 17,000 euros that he had in cash at home to a woman at the front door.
We are now looking for this.
Pensioners are often the target of fraud: cases are increasing
Telephone scams like this, in which criminals pose as prosecutors and demand deposits of several thousand euros from victims, are not uncommon, a police spokesman in Mannheim said, according to the
dpa
.
The investigators have known about the scam for a long time.
It was only in February that a case became known in which a 90-year-old pensioner from Zorneding in Upper Bavaria fell victim to the same scam: the fraudsters behind the call persuaded the pensioner to give valuables worth several thousand euros to an unknown person hand over.
The criminal police are also investigating this case.
Numerous other cases have been known in the past in which criminals faked emergencies in order to defraud their fraud victims of sometimes very large amounts of money.
(fh)