Respirators are a rare commodity because of the corona pandemic. Fraudsters wanted to capitalize on this situation and get a lot of money with a trick. The state of North Rhine-Westphalia had also invested almost 15 million euros.
Traunstein (dpa) - An international, million-dollar scam with non-existent respiratory masks has been discovered by investigators from Bavaria. The injured were two sales companies based in Hamburg and Zurich, said the public prosecutor's office in Traunstein.
They were to deliver around ten million masks to the state of North Rhine-Westphalia for just under 15 million euros. The managing director of the two companies comes from the Upper Bavarian town of Traunstein.
According to the announcement, the companies had already made a down payment of around 2.4 million euros to the alleged delivery companies after clever deception by the perpetrators. When the masks did not arrive as planned, the managing director filed a complaint on March 30. Apparently still in time: More than two million of the transferred money have now been discovered and frozen in accounts abroad, the prosecutor reported. North Rhine-Westphalia had already paid - around 14.7 million euros to the Swiss sales company. Of this, 12.3 million euros had already been repaid.
According to Tuesday, NRW Minister of Health Karl-Josef Laumann (CDU) assumes that the country has not suffered any financial damage. In addition, the minister said at the request of the German press agency: "The process shows: The market for protective equipment has essentially collapsed and there are sometimes wild-west manners with criminal machinations."
The managing director had received offers for the protective masks from the fraudsters in mid-March. The state government in Düsseldorf was very interested and ordered around ten million pieces. The goods were to be handed over in the Netherlands via several European middlemen. According to the investigators, around 52 delivery vehicles were already ready to bring the much-needed protective masks from the Netherlands to North Rhine-Westphalia, even from the border in Germany with police escorts.
Investigations are still ongoing in several countries. The perpetrators have hijacked the identity of a company in other European countries, the prosecutor reported. She did not provide any further details for reasons of investigation. In Traunstein, a special department of the public prosecutor's office is involved in the prosecution of cross-border crime, the so-called Traunstein model. Officials from the criminal police and investigative authorities in several European countries are also deployed.