The Court of Madrid will begin to hear evidence from today, Wednesday, against 13 people accused of defrauding their elderly victims through the sale of encyclopaedias.
The victims were allegedly coerced to pay exorbitant prices for being advised and even for unsubscribing as a client, resulting in the criminal group extorting 184,700 euro from at least 10 elderly people.
Those standing trial are accused of the crimes of belonging to a criminal organisation, continued fraud and falsification of an official and commercial document and for whom the Prosecutor’s Office requests between five and seven years in prison, as well as compensation for the value of the scammed money.
According to the prosecutor’s account, between 2011 and 2016 the defendants managed to get hold of 43,000 euro from one victim, 37,645 from another, 40,550 from a third and so on until pocketing almost 185,000 euro, until one of the victims denounced the events and several of the perpetrators subsequently caught “red-handed”, with books and documents.
In some of the seized papers, descriptions of the victims were recorded, and some were even said to be “silly and a buyer.”
The “modus operandi” consisted of sharing the databases of clients of companies in which they had worked selling books, although they no longer belonged to them. Thus, they addressed the elderly and “easily manipulated, through deception and coercion.”
In this way, they managed to get the victims to pay large sums of money “for the purchase of encyclopaedias or, even, for unsubscribing from the database, the defendants even communicating among themselves the data of the most vulnerable clients for the purposes of making massive sales of books to them”, details the indictment.
In one of the cases, in which the victim lost more than 40,000 euro, one of the defendants took advantage of the data of a client of the former company to call her in February 2015 and ask her to pay 15,600 euro for a debt allegedly contracted by her sister, now deceased and who had never been a client of said publishing house, threatening her that otherwise she would be sued and her home would be seized.
Thus, a first payment of 2,300 euro was secured, fraudulently, and then another of 12,700, the defendant committing to send proof of payment that he never sent.
Then another defendant went to the home of an elderly woman posing as a lawyer and convincing her that she could be the victim of a scam and the “lawyer” would accompany her to denounce the matter and thus gain her trust, after which another defendant called her demanding that she pay 2,000 euro for that legal representation, otherwise they would denounce it and they could repossess the apartment.
Later, another person involved went to the victim’s house on two occasions and charged him 5,000 and 10,000 euro for the purchase of books. On other occasions, the elderly woman paid them 5,500 and 4,500 euro. While another defendant made two charges to her account, without her consent, of 1,000 and 2,000 euro. The woman also bought several book collections from other suspects for 3,960 euro.
The other cases are similar, and in one of them the members of the group left an elderly woman in a difficult economic situation, emphasises the Prosecutor’s Office.
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