Cinema-worthy staging, palaces, luxury watches and diamonds, these are the ingredients of this great old-fashioned scam.
Six suspected crooks, aged 30 to 51, appear this Thursday before the Paris Criminal Court for theft in an organized group and criminal association.
They are suspected of having committed, between March and April 2019, two scams and an attempt to seize a diamond and four Patek Philippe watches worth more than 500,000 euros.
It was in February two years ago that this bad move was brewing in the padded world of lounges in upscale Parisian hotels.
An American wants to sell his Patek Philippe watches.
“He has just bought them for 500,000 euros and wants to do a tumble by selling them for 600,000 euros,” explains a magistrate.
The victim knows a Canadian who puts him in touch with a buyer, a certain Daniel Vincente.
An assumed name of course.
Counterfeit banknotes at the bottom of the black briefcase
Several business meetings are held at the Westin, Costes and Le Collectionneur hotels.
M. Vincente plays his role perfectly and presents Stéphane, his partner and a banker to the seller.
In the luxurious setting of a large 5 star hotel, they even come with a ticket counting machine.
But the American buyer remains suspicious.
His intermediary reassures him and, to bait him, one of the crooks even buys him a Rolex watch at 44,000 euros, paid for in real 500 euros bills.
And on March 19 during the fourth and last meeting, the deal was concluded.
The seller hands over his four watches and in exchange receives a black briefcase with a layer of real banknotes on top and a whole lot of fake banknotes stamped specimens underneath.
The American has lost everything ...
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Business resumed in early April, when the team made contact with an intermediary who wanted to sell a diamond for the benefit of a woman.
Meetings are organized at Pullman and Plaza Athénée hotels.
And on April 3 in a room rented for the occasion at the Mercure hotel, the false buyer and a false gemologist exchange the precious stone for a briefcase containing 5,000 euros in counterfeit banknotes.
The loot remains untraceable
The investigators of the brigade of repression of the astute delinquency (BRDA) are on the heels of the team of sourfins.
The wiretaps allow them to realize that they are on another hit.
The project is to get hold of three new Rolex watches and a first meeting is organized with the seller at the Concorde hotel, in the Montparnasse district.
Officials monitor scammers and with the help of video surveillance identify cars and their drivers.
On April 9, when they returned from a first meeting in this hotel in the 14th arrondissement, three members of the gang were arrested in Noisy-le-Sec (Seine-Saint-Denis) before being indicted and imprisoned.
Two other criminals will spontaneously appear before the examining magistrate a few months later.
And the latter was recently stuck while actively wanted for a year.
During their interrogations, the majority of the suspects confess on the thefts of diamonds and watches but are reluctant to recognize the attempt.
One of them even claims that he did give the American 500,000 euros and that the Patek watches were fake.
The diamond, it would have been resold in Antwerp (Belgium) where many professionals are installed, for 2,500 euros.
As for the fate of the precious Patek watches, the mystery remains intact two years after the fact ...
Rip deal, an old scam that still works
The "rip deal" is an old scam well known to the police, but it still works.
This scam consists of giving the buyer confidence before stealing his property with a sleight of hand or paying for it with counterfeit bills.
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Last November, a team formed by members of the Romanian and Serbian communities, long established in Bondy (Seine-Saint-Denis) and Perreux-sur-Marne (Val-de-Marne), was arrested by the police judicial.
They were running around Europe in search of victims.
They are particularly suspected of having committed a theft, on August 7, in the living room of the Martinez hotel in Cannes (Alpes-Maritimes), of a diamond worth 4.5 million euros.
Two years ago, investigators from the Central Office for the Repression of Major Financial Crime (OCRGDF) knocked down another team that was using special furniture.
The crooks, who managed to capture more than five million euros, dangled investments in jewelry or works of art and asked the victims to bring a large sum of cash.
During a meeting in a luxury hotel, the aigrefins proposed to the unfortunate client to store his money in a secretary.
There, in a secret wall of this piece of furniture called a "rip deal table", was hidden an accomplice who exchanged banknotes with counterfeit money.