Milan Kilian
Reporter of the Pilsen region
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Police officers of the Plzeň Municipal Police Directorate are currently dealing with four cases in which women ran into fraudsters who approached them by phone or social networks. They jumped on the bandwagon of a fake banker, mechanical or ship engineer. One lost almost three million crowns.
“The women are 31, 64, 58, and 48 years old. According to the facts established so far, the first of them was contacted by an as yet unknown man, who told her on the phone that he was an employee of the security department of a banking companies and asked her what bank she had an account with. The woman gave him this information. The next day, another employee of the security department called her, this time from the banking company with which the victim has an account. He told her that her account had been attacked by hackers and convinced her to send an amount of 89,000 crowns to the account he dictated to the woman,” police spokeswoman Michaela Raindlová described the first of the cases.
According to her, the second victim also received a similar phone call. A “bank employee” contacted her saying that someone had hacked her account. The person in question then gradually sent a total amount of 36 thousand crowns from her account to an unknown account.
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The third woman from Pilsen lost 65 thousand crowns. She sent the money to a “mechanical engineer” who claimed to work on a tanker ship and asked the victim to send money to cover the expenses of a company that is withholding documents from his family home in Canada, as well as documents from a vehicle and $750,000 in cash.
Sovereignly the biggest damage she suffered the last of the four-leaf clover of burnt women. “At the beginning of 2023, she was contacted by an as yet unknown perpetrator posing as a ship engineer through one of the social networks. He told the forty-eight-year-old woman in mutual written communication that he was planning to move to the Czech Republic and that he would send her a package with his personal belongings, which he would keep with her before coming to see her. The injured party agreed to everything,” Raindlová recounted, adding that the next day she received a message on her mobile phone from the shipping company demanding that she send several payments related to the delivery of the package. The woman gradually sent almost one million seven hundred thousand crowns to various unknown accounts. Subsequently, she handed over a sum of one million two hundred thousand crowns to a still unidentified person. In total, she lost nearly three million crowns.
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“In all cases, we initiated criminal proceedings for suspicion of committing a misdemeanor under water and we are looking for the perpetrators. At the same time, we again warn you not to respond to similar phone calls, not to share your personal data with anyone, to be cautious and not to respond to any calls to send or withdraw cash and possibly deposit it into other accounts or even hand it over to a stranger,” appealed the policewoman.
