Fraudster was tricked into giving a reading at the police station after complaints that she’d conned vulnerable victims
Fraudster was tricked into giving a reading at the police station after complaints that she’d conned vulnerable victims
A Russian fortune-teller who conned elderly people out of their savings was tricked by cops when they invited her to the police station to give them reading and later arrested her.
Her ability to predict the future also failed to warn her that she was being filmed when she tried to con her latest victim with the footage allowing police to identify her.
The suspected scammer, 53, who has not been named, was arrested in the district of Orekhovo-Zuyevsky in the Russian region of Moscow Oblast.
“We had been looking for the suspect after she had approached a 72-year-old woman and asked if she could have any unused objects that the woman might have at home to sell,” head of the press service of the regional headquarters of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, Tatyana Petrova, said.
The kindly pensioner gracefully agreed to help the other woman and took her to her flat, where the suspect then announced to the 72-year-old that she was a mystic and could communicate with the spirits and that she could sense an ‘evil eye’ had been imposed on her.
The fraudster then explained that she could remove the curse by praying into a handkerchief that was wrapped around money and jewelry.
At some stage, however, the fraudster switched the bundle, and the pensioner who was told to keep it under her pillow only discovered the next day that it had vanished when she went to check on her valuables.
The victim said the items were valued at around two thousand dollars.
The police managed to identify the suspect using CCTV footage which led to her arrest.
“During the search of her temporary residence, operatives found and seized the stolen property. It was also found that the fortune-teller was involved in a similar crime in the same area of the city district,” Petrova said.
The alleged scammer complained about being tricked to the police station with an offer to do some fortune-telling for offices after which she was arrested.
She had been charged with fraud, but it is unclear if she remains in prison or if she is expected to be kept there while the investigation is concluded.
Studies state that there has been a slight increase in the crime rate in Russia in 2019 as compared to the previous years’ records, as per research. The reported rate of crime stood at more than 1, 000 cases per 100, 000 population.
During the time period between 2015 to 2020, the rate dropped by 240 registered crimes per 100,000 people and fraud/theft were the top crimes that took place in the country. Digital fraud and cybercrime are the latest additions to the crime that takes places in Russia, as per data.
(Edited by Praveen Pramod Tewari and Vaibhav Vishwanath Pawar)
