A fake US soldier in Syria scams 356,000 euros on Facebook from a woman from Ávila

The US special security agent stationed by the UN in Syria was not an elite soldier he claimed to be, but seven small-time, smooth-talking fraudsters.

The National Police have now arrested them many kilometers from Damascus, specifically, in Guadalajara, accused of stealing 356,500 euros from a woman from Ávila who they deceived after contacting her through the social network Facebook posing as a man from peace in the midst of war in Syria.

The “love scam” scam worked and, after gaining their trust, they managed to get the victim to send them thousands of euros to help the agent, who was supposedly injured and who, in theory, was trying to get a large amount of money out of it.

For this she needed the help of the innocent woman from Avila, who was paying and paying, through credits, until the employees of her bank, alarmed by her strange economic movements, alerted her that she was possibly the victim of a hoax .

Only then, she reported.

The investigation that has concluded with the arrest of the seven fraudsters began last October, when the victim went to the Ávila police station to denounce that she had been talking on Facebook for a year with a supposed US military officer. He regularly sent her photos and he had managed to make him believe that he was carrying out a military intelligence position for the UN on Syrian soil, where he had been seriously injured in the leg.

The woman, convinced that this was the case, received an order from this supposed soldier: she would have to keep "a significant amount of money that she wanted to get out of there for fear that it would be taken away from her," according to what the Police reported on Thursday.

Meanwhile, he could arrange a trip to meet her and recover from her injuries.

He even assured her that he would settle in Spain to restore normalcy.

It was the beginning of the deception.

Once caught, the scammers summoned her to communicate with them outside of Facebook to “escape security checks” and remove incriminating traces, profiles, or conversations.

At that moment, another element of the plot made an appearance: a supposed security company, which approached her to ask her to hand over different sums in order to resolve "procedures" that would make it easier for those amounts that the soldier intended to rescue to reach his power, as well as a key that would allow him to open the box containing the funds the American was trying to send him.

The woman from Avila, fully convinced, requested several bank loans to cover these requests.

It was the workers of the entity who let her know, given the economic volume that she was extracting, that perhaps she was suffering from a scam.

The woman filed a complaint and the police began "a long and laborious investigation" that made it possible to "fully identify the authors of the scam" and their subsequent location in Guadalajara.

There were arrested the seven people who for months weaved the web of lies based on getting photos and data from other users of social networks that would give credibility to the story.