The prosecutor's office in Bamberg announced on Friday, 18 Octoberabout a successful international campaign against extortion fraudsters money the “grandchild” method. During operations in Germany, Poland, Great Britain and Belgium eight people were arrested. They are said to be the heads of the gang, from whose ranks seventeen other members have already been arrested.
This is an unprecedented operation that was coordinated primarily with the police in Warsaw. A joint investigation has been underway for a year into shocking phone calls in which elderly people in particular are tricked into paying large sums of money because they allegedly accident or the suffering of their relatives.
Call center in Poland and 14,000 calls
During the first operation last year, a call center operating in Poland was discovered, from which approximately 14,000 connections of this type were made to Germany. The liquidation of the center led to a significant decrease in the number of grandchild fraud cases in Germany at the beginning of 2024. During the operation across Germany, 17 people were caught red-handed receiving money from those they had cheated on.
As part of the current operation, logistics people who controlled the receipt of cash in various European countries were detained. Eight arrested people were handed over to justice authorities in Warsaw, London and Brussels. The two main suspects in the Bavarian investigation are Poles, aged 23 and 30. They are now to be extradited to Germany by British authorities. They are accused of causing damage worth several million euro.
(AFP/stef)
The article comes from the website Deutsche Welle