Rome: 'Spiral' scam degenerates into 3 million euro home robbery against 80-year-old, alleged perpetrator arrested

It could be the script of a short film, but it is the narration of a scam, which later degenerated into a house robbery, carried out against an eighty-year-old Roman woman who had an afternoon to forget.

“Sit down because I have some bad news for you.” This is how the first actor begins the script of a scam that escalated over six hours on October 4, 2024. There are two actors overall: the fake lawyer and the fake Carabinieri marshal. At the conclusion of the investigations of the Flying Squad coordinated by the Public Prosecutor's Office of Rome, Yesterday morning, one of the perpetrators - a 35-year-old Neapolitan - was arrested in execution of an order issued by the Judge for Preliminary Investigations at the Court of Rome, who ordered his precautionary restriction in prison.

The story begins with the news of the alleged arrest at a Carabinieri station in Venice of the victim's daughter, responsible, according to the alleged non-commissioned officer, for running over a woman. On the other end of the line, a supposed lawyer who presses her with the first request for money, equal to approximately €6500, intended to protect the woman responsible for the car crash. If the elderly mother had paid that sum as an oblation, no one would have filed a complaint against the young woman. The victim, stunned by anxiety and apprehension for her daughter, falls into the trap and hands over the requested sum to the scammers, as well as some gold jewelry.

But the plot, however, continues, as the alleged lawyer asks the woman for her cell phone number, anticipating the call of a Carabinieri marshal who was dealing with the episode described. Then a real escalation of the scam begins with calls that follow one another and that also result in the access, on several occasions, of the accomplices inside the woman's apartment. In desperation, now convinced that she must help her daughter, the woman does not even refrain from opening the safe kept in the house, delivering gold bars into the hands of her scammers.

As often happens, there is no lack of recommendations from the latter addressed to the woman aimed at not contacting other members of the family. Indeed, when, during one of the calls, her interlocutors become aware of an imminent visit that the victim would receive shortly, they manage to convince her to have the guest sit upstairs so that she would remain unaware of what was happening.

Thus, as the hours pass, the woman also fills a canvas bag with family silverware, which she ends up handing over to her detractors even while going out into the street, late at night, in the pouring rain, slavishly following their instructions.

The sequence of scenes unfolds with an incessant fraudulent progression, in which nothing, in the criminal plan, appears to be left to chance. There is no lack of a violent drift in the evolution of the facts when one of the scammers, who entered the house during the late afternoon hours, did not hesitate to threaten the woman by grabbing her by the arm and threatening violence if she did not comply with the request. He threatened to "break her in two" and "throw her out of the window" while ransacking drawers and furniture.

In carrying out their plan, the same scammers also took great care to keep all of the woman's telephone lines busy, both landline and mobile, with the obvious aim of preventing her from possibly contacting a family member and thus ruining the pactum sceleris.

Overall, they managed to steal approximately 3.000.000 euros in cash, jewelry and gold bars.

The victim herself caused the story to be discovered. Only after the last and exhausting call, when her detractors finally released her mobile number, did she manage to call her daughter. When, shortly after, the latter reached her home, the elderly woman became aware of what had happened to her and called the police.

The investigations conducted by the State Police have led to a man originally from the Neapolitan hinterland, framed by the images extrapolated from the video surveillance system in the building where the victim of this sad episode resides. His physiognomy, traced in the database of the Police Forces, provided an initial clue that was then integrated and completed with further investigative developments. The scammer's telephone, the same instrument with which the crime was committed, in fact further framed the arrested person. The man is charged with fraud and robbery, both aggravated by being committed within his home. According to the reconstruction by the police, in one instance, the 35-year-old allegedly threw the woman onto a chair, threatening to throw it at him.

Following the activity coordinated by the Public Prosecutor's Office of Rome, he was placed under arrest by the judicial police for aggravated robbery. In-depth investigations are currently underway to identify the perpetrators who acted in concert in the same crime.