Cagliari: 28-year-old arrested for extortion and self-laundering, pretended to be a policeman to defraud elderly people.

This morning, the State Police executed the order of precautionary custody in prison issued by the Judge for Preliminary Investigations, at the request of the Public Prosecutor's Office of Cagliari, against a 28-year-old Neapolitan for the alleged crimes of aggravated extortion and self-laundering committed in Cagliari against elderly people using the “fake carabiniere” technique.

The provision accepted the findings of the investigations carried out by the Property Crimes section and the "Falchi" group of the Cagliari Flying Squad, which began in the first days of last July, when two elderly victims had turned to the State Police because they had been forced to give up money and jewels, for a total value of over 150 thousand euros, to people who had shown up at their home, following telephone contact by a fake Carabiniere or Police Commissioner.

The technique is always the same: the victim is contacted on his or her landline or mobile phone number by a person who presents himself or herself as an authoritative person (lawyer, carabinieri or police commissioner) to inform him or her that his or her son or daughter has caused a serious road accident resulting in serious injuries to a pedestrian, under threat of certain imprisonment if he or she does not surrender his or her belongings. The elderly person, therefore, in the grip of panic and reduced to a state of psychological constraint, is faced with the inevitability of the fact and the only way out of giving up all the gold and cash in his possession, in order to avoid prison for his son.

While the victim is constantly held on the phone, so that you can't ask anyone for help, the person in charge of collecting the collected goods shows up, who often also presents himself as a policeman, lawyer or in any case collaborator of whoever has made contact with the unfortunate victims.

In this case too the two victims had described the same situation by filing a complaint.

In the meantime the young man had managed to leave the island and the police continued their investigation, also by analysing the video surveillance systems in the area and by combing through the gold-buying shops in the city. where the alleged perpetrator had gotten rid of part of the extorted jewels, exchanging them for cash.

Thanks to the above mentioned activity, serious evidence of guilt was collected, accepted in the precautionary measure that was executed this morning in collaboration with the investigators of the Naples Flying Squad, tracking down the young man at his home in the municipality of Afragola (NA) and taking him to prison.