It was August, he was resting and his cell phone rang.
The woman had just received a message from a former co-worker in the hospitality industry.
"Hello!
I don't know if you remember me, we worked together a year ago,” she began.
Yes, she remembered it, they had met for a while and had become good friends, but they were not intimate.
The man seemed desperate.
His former partner told him that his grandmother had just died and that he didn't have money to go to the funeral.
He asked her for 50 euros to take a taxi.
They were the first of the more than 200,000 euros that he ended up receiving from the accounts of the woman and her aunt in the following five months.
That same day, that first transfer through the Bizum instant payment system was followed by several.
He, who is about 30 years old, insisted that he was not getting the money and asked her to send it to him again and again.
Seeing that the first attempt had been so easy, he decided to continue with his ploy.
The means to continue convincing his victim to give him his money was punishment.
And so he continued until he got 5,000 euros from her, with different excuses.
When the requests of her supposed friend exceeded her financial capacity, she asked her aunt for help in the difficult situation that her former co-worker was going through.
The woman, around 65 years old, also believed the story of that poor man who seemed overwhelmed by circumstances.
The messages were constant and always sought compassion from both women.
“I know you are very good”, “I am aware of the effort this requires”, “I will give you everything back”, she wrote to them.
The next fictional story she invented was that she needed money for her grandmother's funeral, an exorbitant amount for a normal funeral in Spain.
But the women continued to trust him.
The aunt even gave her thousands of euros.
In a final phase, when the nonsense was excessive, he assured them that he was ready to return what he had borrowed, but that to do so he had to request a loan.
But the condition for the bank to give them money was that there had to be cash in their account.
The women were already distrustful, they had blocked and unblocked him several times, they warned him that they were already left with nothing, but they trusted his words one last time.
But the money never arrived.
In January, aware that they had been deceived, they went to their district police station, in the Salamanca neighborhood of Madrid, to file a complaint.
Investigator D. had no doubt that everything pointed to a scam.
“He is a convincing person, not at all arrogant, who knows what he has to say and who plays to make you feel sorry for him,” says the police officer.
The victims recounted months of payments through Bizum, bank transfers and even appointments at ATMs where the aunt took out the money to hand-deliver it to the supposed friend in need.
Everything was proven, the alleged scammer was so confident that he never hid his name or his real number.
He thought that they would never be able to report him.
After gathering all the evidence of the deception, investigator D. verified that this man had eight accounts in his name, to make it difficult to trace his finances.
In addition, he had a history of this type of incident.
When they handcuffed him, he continued with his role, he seemed sorry and even shed tears telling his story.
They were of no use to him, because the evidence was too strong to continue believing the grandmother's story.
“Seeing that it worked at first, he continued until the amount was exorbitant.
He saw a vein and decided to continue,” says the police officer.
He was arrested, accused of taking more than 200,000 euros from his victims, of which they now hope to recover at least part.
Subscribe here
to our daily newsletter about Madrid.