In mid-January, Teresa, a friendly and sweet owner of a rural house in Asturias, received a message from a foreign number. A man who claimed to be a businessman reserved one of his accommodations between the 21st and 29th for his son. He guaranteed 100% payment in advance and asked the owner to make the purchase before her arrival, for which she offered to pay him 1,000 euros, 300 more than the eight-day reservation cost. “He asked me for ice cream from Mercadona, Nesquick, a 12-pack of Coca-Cola, chocolate...,” the woman remembers. A few days later, a man appeared in a Tesla brand taxi who introduced himself as an engineer, the son of an important Canadian mine manager who had to spend the night in Asturias those days to meet with several mayors. For a week they lived with a man whom the police have chased throughout Spain. They even prepared broth for him and brought medicine when he caught a cold.
“He introduced himself to us as Luis Eduardo,” says Teresa's son. “He brought a very expensive champagne and also a whiskey that she liked to drink, a Macallan from a specific year,” the woman recalls. She stayed in his accommodation for a week during which Luis Eduardo and Teresa's family became good friends, they even spent an afternoon together drinking a wine bought by him. In those conversations, the guest showed them photos of his supposed family in Canada, in which of course he never appeared, and told them that his mother had had a construction company in Madrid, but that she sold it when Pedro Sánchez won the elections. “He didn't keep his mouth shut,” summarizes the son. He boasted about buying bags worth 4,000 euros and even gave a pair of pants valued at 900 euros to Teresa. “I still have them, but I don't wear them in case it's illegal,” says the woman, half seriously, half joking.
The problem is that the transfer money that the man's father had supposedly made never arrived. His client excused herself by saying that since it was an operation from a Canadian bank, it would take a few days to arrive. She went to her entity several times that week, where they did not see anything strange in the documents that her guest had sent her as proof of payment. That week she gave her time for everything, even for the supposed engineer to get sick and the kind Teresa prepared him some homemade broth. “My son did start to see something strange and confronted him because the money wasn't coming, then he got scared and left,” says Teresa. Shortly after, the driver of the taxi in which she had traveled from Madrid called them worried because he had not received payment either. Thus they confirmed that they had all been victims of a scammer.
When this case came to the attention of the Madrid Provincial Immigration and Border Brigade, its members knew perfectly well that it was the man whose trail they had been following for more than two years. His real name is Darwin, he is 28 years old and far from being a millionaire. “He does not spend more than a week in the same place and now he spends more time going to towns, because he thinks it is more difficult to track in small towns,” police sources detail. The first time they heard about him was because he had falsified a passport to rent tourist accommodation in Madrid. “We realized that this documentation had already been used in other fraud complaints,” summarizes an agent. Since that moment, this police officer's goal has been to anticipate his movements to stop his next scam, something that happened on March 15 in Lugo.
That day, they detected his presence in a rural accommodation from which he was about to leave. “He always says that he is Canadian or Chilean and other information that makes us suspicious because we already know him, so we try to go after him when we detect that he may be in a new accommodation. He is a constant hunt, once we arrived at an Airbnb where the cleaning lady told us that he had left 15 minutes earlier,” he summarizes. In the case of Lugo, they had the help of the hotel owner, who was entertaining the fake millionaire's son until the national police agents arrived. In those days, the hotelier himself had taken his client back and forth by car several times to Santiago, where he had gone out to party. On those trips, the man did not stop talking about his family, his businesses and his luxuries.
When he was arrested in Lugo, he claimed to be called Benjamín and spoke to the agents with a marked Latin accent, even though he does not normally speak that way because, although he is of Peruvian origin, he has been in Spain since he was three years old. Later, at the police station, he acknowledged that he had a problem, that he cannot help lying and promised to return everything stolen. The judge released him. “He is so used to lying that it comes naturally to him, he doesn't tell the truth even about his date of birth or he starts talking about brothers that he doesn't have,” says a police source who knows him very well.
A year ago, a message similar to the one received by the hotelier in Asturias arrived in the reservation mailbox of a prestigious nightlife group in Madrid. The Canadian businessman wanted, in this case, for his son to have a good time to celebrate his birthday. In this case, the son was called Arturo Bisbal. “First he asked for a booth and alcohol costs of up to 5,000 euros, then he backed off and raised this figure to 7,000. “He asked us not to lack anything,” says Dani, one of those in charge of the nightclubs. The alleged Arturo arrived, feigning the accent of an English speaker unaccustomed to Spanish and accompanied by three girls. He “Started inviting as if there was no tomorrow. At first he was shy, but as he drank he loosened up,” says the person affected. He drank, of course, 800 euro Macallan reserve whiskey.
When he had consumed drinks worth 14,000 euros, double what his father had supposedly paid through a transfer, Dani pointed it out to him. Arturo then took out his cell phone to supposedly make a transfer in front of the eyes of the nightclub manager. “It was an application that perfectly imitated the transaction, which even included a confirmation message,” he points out.
In the following days, the alleged Arturo continued writing to Dani. On one occasion he called him from a security checkpoint in the exclusive neighborhood of La Moraleja to ask him to go pick him up and go out partying with him. When he arrived, the man told him that Marta Ortega, the president of Inditex, who he had been with since lunchtime, had just left. “It's part of my job, I accompanied him, I was with him for a while and I left. I think that at that moment they had already begun to suspect the tourist accommodation where he was staying that he was a scammer and that's why he didn't want to be there,” summarizes the night businessman. He repeated one more early morning party. He left 75,000 euros in those three nights, he constantly asked the establishment's employees to buy girls drinks. Those days he also told anyone who wanted to listen that his father was a millionaire thanks to the precious metal mines.
The reality of his life is so different from what he tells that it is difficult to decipher. The only thing known about him is that he was born in Peru and arrived in Spain when he was three years old. He has family near Madrid with whom he has a distant relationship. “He is modifying his strategy slightly. A while ago he said that he was a medical student, then he moved on to the Canadian businessman,” these same sources add. What is certain is that he has accumulated around twenty criminal records and that he has left traces of him in Catalonia, Extremadura, Seville and Logroño. And it may continue to spread, because he is back on the street.
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