Genoa. Elderly people still targeted by scammers – more or less “creative” – in Genoa. On Wednesday, three reports were received by the police from different areas of the city, and if in two cases the victims reacted, in the third the scam unfortunately succeeded.
The first report arrived around 1.30pm from the Dinegro area. An 87-year-old woman reported being contacted on her landline by a man posing as a member of the police force, who told her that her son was in the barracks after causing an accident. The pensioner, despite her advanced age, did not trust her and used her cell phone to call her son: when she realized that she was a scammer she immediately interrupted the conversation and called 112.
Around 6pm, however, an 85-year-old from Castelletto reported an attempted scam who reported to 112 that he had received several phone calls from a person who presented himself as an employee of a bank and informed him that an account in his name in the UK it was blocked. To unlock it, the self-styled employee said, the man would have had to make a bank transfer of 372 euros. Even in this case the pensioner did not trust him and interrupted the phone call, then calling the police.
The last report arrived shortly after 7pm from a neighborhood in the eastern part of Genoa. Here a 76-year-old woman handed over the jewels and money she had at home to a self-styled lawyer who contacted her, backed by a fake policeman, telling her that her daughter had been arrested after an accident and that it was necessary to pay the bail of 6,500 euros. When the police intervened, there was no longer a trace of the scammers.
This article is originally published on genova24.it