With an infernal discomfort that drilled into his head, Adrián (53) took just a microsecond to understand what had happened.
His half-closed eyes could see the desecrated apartment, the jumbled drawers, the girl with whom he had spent the night out of frame.
Dazed, his body did not respond to begin to take charge of the situation he faced and
he passed out again
on the bed.
Almost four hours later he woke up, still upset, and asked a neighbor for the phone to call a friend to come help him and take him to a hospital.
He had just been the victim of another black widow case.
But far from ending, the story with the "young lady" (that's what he still calls her) who
had just robbed
him was just beginning.
Because as soon as he recovered he began a very fine, almost obsessive detective work, to find the thief again and solve a
type of crime that is increasingly frequent
and, in many cases, very difficult to solve.
And it had a positive result: he found it again, although with a bittersweet taste.
The cases of black widows are not new or novel.
Women and men who meet with men whom they seduce and, once they are in their homes, they rob them.
But since the pandemic there has been an
increase in events
, in line with a
boom
in scams of all kinds.
It is a growth that is linked to two factors.
First, since they are crimes without weapons,
scams have much lower penalties
.
On the other hand, the emergence of digital platforms such as social networks or dating applications make them a way to search for victims on a larger scale, even in an automated way.
It is no longer necessary to go to the bar to get up (although it is still done), it is enough to have a couple of Tinder profiles that last until a victim bites.
This is how Milagros appeared on Tinder to catch his victims.
This is how Adrián fell, who told his case to
Clarín
.
The story began a little over a year ago, in January 2023. He had
matched
on Tinder with a girl named Milagros.
It wasn't the first time he used the app, but he admits that she went to the meeting "with her guard down."
After a while of chatting, they coordinated via WhatsApp to meet a while later at a bar in Palermo Hollywood.
Since he was nearby, he arrived within a few minutes.
Until then, everything is in order.
They stayed having something until just before 3 o'clock, when the lights in the bar turned on.
"She was a charming girl, she spoke well, dressed well, she said that she was studying to be a therapeutic companion at the UAI, that she had lived in Necochea. She had a pleasant conversation. I was impressed that she was educated," he reconstructs.
At the time of the bill, she insisted "horrors" to pay her share.
That detail ended up generating confidence in Adrián.
She now reads it as
one more move in the plan to finish lowering her guard.
To catch him.
They walked to her house although first they stopped by a kiosk to buy some energy and champagne.
They arrived at her house, a couple of blocks away, and she prepared the drinks.
There she slipped him
benzodiazepine
, a drug with a sedative effect.
Then they had sex and went out to the balcony to smoke a cigarette.
His attention was caught by a
white car
that was parked on the street next to his apartment.
He remembers that he stayed for just a minute and started without anyone getting on or off.
As he found it curious, he told Milagros.
She did not say anything.
A few minutes later,
he lost consciousness.
Black widows take advantage of dating apps to deceive those looking for a partner.
What follows he was able to reconstruct based on the cameras.
The girl and two other male accomplices spent two hours in her house
rummaging through her belongings.
They took 2,500 dollars and 110 thousand pesos, a 32'' TV, a laptop, clothes, perfumes, a
carry-on
suitcase and his cell phone among other things.
The next day, when Adrián got up, a friend had to help him recover.
They gave him serum at the hospital to recover.
He filed a complaint at the police station.
They told him to be patient, but to have little hope of finding her.
That expectations were low
He took it as a challenge.
On the one hand, she began to write to them insistently every two days asking for progress.
On the other hand, he began his own investigation of it.
She opened parallel Tinder accounts and began
patrolling the dating app
to see if she found her again.
She also had some friends use her profiles to hunt for the widow.
The photos of "Lucia", the same as that of Milagros, the black widow who stole from Adrián.
And he found it.
It was no longer Milagros, it was Nicole.
She was Lucía
, she was Sofia again.
They were always the same photos, almost the same tastes.
The same spider web.
The investigation
According to police sources told
Clarín
, these types of gangs are usually small.
They work with 4 or 5 members, where there are one or two
girls who are the visible faces
and a couple of men who are there as support when stealing or being attentive, standing guard with the car.
Members can be exchanged from one band to the other, but they are small groups.
There are also cases of 'black widowers', although they are the least.
These work to attract other men.
"In 30 years of my career I had only one man rob a woman," he adds.
"There are more cases than we know, we believe that only half are reported," summary from the police.
As he explains, the majority of people who are assaulted prefer not to report it out of shame.
"Sometimes they have a girlfriend, wife or they simply
don't want to look bad in front of friends, neighbors or family
," summarizes another source.
Widows create fake profiles on dating apps like Badoo, Tinder, Happn, or even Instagram or Facebook.
They apply various filters to the images, but they use real photos so that the victim does not later feel that there is something strange at the time of the encounter.
In the first meeting that Adrián had with the brigade, they had shown him photos of other black widows that the Police had identified, but none of them were the ones that had caught him.
When he found her again online, he took the information to the investigators to see if they could move forward, but they responded that her only chance was to make another appointment to catch her.
Although he did not make the
match
,
he crossed paths again several times on different social networks.
Dating applications are reluctant to share information at times, and they usually do so at the request of official organizations or with judicial requests.
Since they do not have offices in Argentina, they take longer to respond to letters.
Meta (owner of Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram) in that sense is much more accessible and responds better.
Clarín
consulted Match (the company that owns Tinder) about the security measures they ask for and why the same photo of a person can be allowed to be used for different profiles.
The company did not respond to the specific query but commented on some information about the
security measures
they take.
However, as of last month the platform is beginning to reinforce its security measures due to the wave of scams.
In the United States and the United Kingdom, they implement a system by which they ask new users for a passport or driving license to verify that the profile is real.
The nest of the black widows
Adrián's investigation revealed another relevant piece of information.
With the information from the cell phone that was stolen, he was able to determine that the car that robbed him had left for Villa Zabaleta.
The
Milagros
who contacted him had said he was from
Parque Patricios
.
Their other versions of Tinder were always within radiuses that, plotted on a map, fell in the same area.
He knew it because he drew those maps.
He put them together in a document that he presented to the police.
Although the data is given in the northern area of the capital, such as Palermo, Belgrano or Villa Urquiza, the widows come from the south, especially from marginal neighborhoods.
"
Villa Zabaleta leads the ranking of black widows,"
summarizes a police source.
It is the nest of spiders.
The journey of the Black Widow gang after robbing Adrián.
During 2023 alone, the City Police dismantled seven gangs that worked under this modality.
Three of them were in Zabaleta.
"They are places that are difficult to access to do field tasks sometimes," they explain.
The WhatsApp number from which Milagros contacted Adrián was linked to the IMEI of a cellular device that gave access to five other numbers, two of which had the girl's photo.
The fall of Milagros
With this data, along with their own investigation, the police were able to find Facebook and Instagram profiles that matched the photos of the black widow.
An analysis with data from Renaper allowed us to identify who she was.
Based on that clue, they raided her home in May of last year.
They didn't find her, but
her father was so hurt to find out that her daughter was doing scams that he gave information to find her:
he was sleeping at her girlfriend's house.
In the second raid the widow did not appear, but a suitcase and a card belonging to Adrián did.
A few days later the widow surrendered.
She was assigned an official defender but she was not detained.
The meticulous investigation that the victim did, so that Justice would later set the thief free.
Although the case ended with the girl's arrest, what happened next caused Adrián almost the same anger as the robbery.
The thing is that, according to what he says, they left him completely out of the criminal process, even though he was the victim.
The prosecution, together with the Oral Criminal and Correctional Court No. 21,
closed an abbreviated trial where the
black widow
pleaded guilty
.
She received a
3-year suspended prison sentence and community service.
He never stepped foot in a cell.
For the court, since it is his first conviction, it would be "stigmatizing" for him to go to jail.
The black widow in another photo as Nicole.
Adrián found out about all this later, when the sentence was already closed.
Nobody called him.
He went to face the prosecutor, he says that he was not even aware of his case.
"He treated me with a pedestal attitude. 'Why are you bothering me?', he told me when I arrived. I hadn't even read the case," he said angrily.
His anger comes from knowing that he did
research work that did not help to solve anything.
"If I didn't move, the case would come to nothing. They told me so themselves. If he has a conviction it's because I moved. I'm tremendously disappointed, I was hoping they would go to oral trial so that he could serve some time in prison. I knew it wasn't easy," he summarizes with resignation.
Not only that.
He also hoped that
he would help find the gang's accomplices
, or that other victims would emerge from the same black widow that attacked him.
None of that happened.
From the experience of the girl who deceived him, he is certain that it was not the first time he acted.
With other filters, with other photos, it may still be there hidden on some social network.
Waiting for the next match on Tinder.
MG