Man convicted of conning elderly woman into believing she was paying for an apartment in heaven!

The Provincial Court of León has sentenced the man who swindled nearly 300,000 euro from an elderly woman with a mental disorder to seven years in prison, whom he made believe that the money was deposited in the ‘Banco del Cielo’ in order to build a home there, along with her deceased mother and husband.

The victim suffers from an alteration in the content of thought, in the form of mystical, religious and megalomaniacal delusional ideation that altered, in its entirety, her capacity for judgment and decision, as it placed her outside of reality. This situation and delusional ideas, at least since 2013, became more present, completely altering her cognitive and volitional capacities.

The magistrates of the Third Section consider it proven that the accused, aware of the woman’s mental state – of her exaggerated religious ideas that made her even consider herself “saint” plotted the possibility of getting hold of all the savings she had deposited in different banking entities.

To this end, he made the old woman believe, with telephone calls from a hidden number, that “Our Lord Jesus Christ” or the “Virgin Mary” was calling to ask her to withdraw different amounts of money from her accounts and give them to him to deposit them in the “Banco del Cielo” and that she should take them to the store that the accused ran, according to information from the Press Office of the Superior Court of Justice of Castilla y León.

Once there, the magistrates report in their resolution “in a massage room in the premises, he told her to put the money in a drawer from where it went to the ‘Banco del Cielo’, causing her to believe that there would be more income for her.” and she could build a house in heaven, next to her mother and husband – both already deceased -, the accused making her believe that he also deposited money in said heavenly bank.”

The sentence explains that to give greater credibility to the “apparitions”, the accused staged conversations in his store or on the telephone, changing or altering his voice and making the old woman believe that he was talking to his deceased mother, God or the Virgin Mary, pressuring her by saying that he was going to kill her children or make the money deposited in heaven disappear if she told those that he was giving her money.

The convicted man has added almost 287,000 euro to his assets from the elderly woman he was deceiving for six years. The victim has lost all of her savings, leaving only the monthly payments of her small pension, which the accused could not get hold of when he was discovered and denounced by the victim’s children.

“Not only has she lost all her savings but she was left in debt with the bank from which she requested a personal loan (finally cancelled with the payment action made by her son) and now she faces her future not with what she had but with what she has been left (only her pension accrued month by month) after the predatory action of the accused who, without a doubt, knew that with his successive demands, he would end up depleting the old woman’s entire assets (remember that she, in her statement at the trial, “She even asked him to buy bread because she no longer had money and he answered that he could not give her anything because he had had some unforeseen expenses due to his mother’s – supposed – illness)”, the magistrates point out in a resolution that can be appealed.

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