Grandmother and grandson lure scammers into a trap: "Let's grab him now, grandma"
Created: 2022-11-15, 21:56
By: Martin Schullerus
An unbeatable team: Grandma Helene Gammer and her grandson Josef Hrasky from Neuried tricked a gang of fraudsters on Tuesday.
© Michael Schönwalder
A true thriller, including an arrest in the act, took place on Tuesday in the middle of Neuried.
The main actors: a brave grandmother, a bright grandson - and professional police officers.
Neuried
– Helene Gammer has nothing to hide.
She is 86 years old, lives happily in the middle of Neuried in the big house where her family, the Hraskys, run the “Vorort” bakery and restaurant – and her full name is in the phone book.
Still.
Because this openness almost became her undoing.
Shocking call
On Tuesday, around 2:15 p.m., Helene Gammer received a call that shook her.
A devastated, crying woman, posing as her granddaughter Johanna, says she was involved in an accident that left someone dead and that the only way she could escape custody was to pay bail of €40,000 immediately.
She should never hang up the phone and see how much money she has in the house.
Helene Gammer doesn't really know what to think of it.
The call is strange and very frightening at the same time.
So she does the only right thing: she puts the receiver down next to the phone and, barefoot and in her pajamas, like she is after a nap, she runs downstairs to the restaurant and calls her grandson, Josef Hrasky.
"I knew right away what was going on.
First I calmed down the grandmother and then called the emergency number 110," says the young man in the Merkur conversation.
The officials advise him that the grandmother should continue the conversation and offer almost 20,000 euros to keep the perpetrators interested and not to deter them.
"Grandma, let's grab them now," says the grandson.
Helene Gammer immediately accepts her role.
She has about 17,000 euros in the house, she tells the caller.
Their heartrending weeping and begging still tugs at the nerves of the good-natured old woman.
Josef Hrasky: "That was a great actress - but grandma was a better one."
"Prosecutor" asks for valuables
When a "public prosecutor" immediately took over the conversation in binding High German and asked for jewelry and gold bars, Helene Gammer increased to a credible indignation: "What do you want, you can't ask for all my belongings!" Finally, they agree that a collector, "Mr. Nowak", should first take over the cash.
The rest will find themselves.
In the meantime, the police pulled out all the stops.
The building is inconspicuously surrounded in a very short time, officers from the special task force for surveillance and arrests with headsets and weapons observe the entire area and also advise the Hraskys in the house.
"Mr. Nowak" has hardly left the A95 when he is targeted by the officers as he drives through Neuried and waits for the address to be given.
Around 4 p.m., Helene Gammer leaves the house to hand over the money.
After ten minutes, a young man in a gray hoodie approaches her - "Mr. Nowak" is standing in front of her.
Not for long: a dozen officers pounce on him, throw him to the ground and pull down his pants.
It is important to stop any microphone wiring to the people behind it immediately.
The collector is a 19-year-old Pole without a permanent residence in Germany.
The investigations show that he was involved in a fraud last Wednesday, in which the perpetrators extorted cash and valuables worth tens of thousands of euros from an 84-year-old woman from Munich.
Now he is in custody.
And Helene Gammer says: "Old people are gullible.
I don't know how it would have turned out without my grandson.”
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