Greek Grandma Outsmarts Telephone Scammers And Gets Them Arrested

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Posted on 12/19/2024 3:39:39 PM PST by nickcarraway

An elderly Greek woman on the island of Crete outsmarted telephone scammers and led police to their arrests. Credit: Asurnipal, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0 A Greek, elderly woman on the island of Crete, outsmarted the telephone scammers who tried to steal thousands of euros from her and led police to their arrest.

According to the police statement, on Tuesday, December 17, unknown scammers called the 86-year-old woman and asked her for 10,000 euros ($10,394) in order to settle legal disputes and cover hospitalization fees for her brother who, the scammers told her, supposedly had an accident.

The elderly woman remained calm and immediately called the police. In coordination with authorities, she duped the scammers by leaving a bag with money outside her house in the city of Chania, Crete.

The police, who were standing nearby, immediately arrested a 77-year-old woman from Bulgaria when she tried to pick up the bag. In her possession were found three mobile phones and ferry tickets, which according to some Greek media reports, would be used to leave the island the next day.

Police have been looking for an accomplice in Athens, who was giving the orders to the Bulgarian woman.

Grecian Delight supports Greece Telephone scams, a growing phenomenon in Greece Telephone scams, mainly targeting older people under the pretext that a relative has had a car accident or has been taken to the hospital have been a growing phenomenon across Greece.

According to a report published in June by the Balkan Investigating Reporting Network (BIRN), Greek police registered 19,264 such telephone scams from June 2021 until the first five months of 2024. The most common lie scammers use is the hospitalization of a relative.

“The gang…is what we call a classic criminal organization, with each member having distinct responsibilities; it starts with the one who identifies the potential victims, usually an elderly person, who seems to have a good financial situation and who has children outside or away,” Antonis Koudroglou, a lawyer who has handled many such cases explained to BIRN.

Older Greeks are easier targets for telephone scammers According to Greek police data provided to BIRN, the number of telephone scams has been steadily increasing every year.

Scammers “target older people because they are more vulnerable and uninformed…and unfortunately you can fool an older person more easily,” Koudroglou said.

Although these crimes can be relatively easy to solve thanks to technology, Koudroglou said that another problem is that many victims do not want to file an official complaint because they are ashamed.

“They don’t want it to be revealed that they were cheated,” he tells BIRN. “This applies to all scams, but as time goes by more and more people are reporting.”

Konstantina Dimoglidou, a Greek police spokeswoman, told BIRN that a Greek police investigation revealed that most of the telephone calls originate from Bulgaria and that most of the perpetrators involved in telephone scams in Greece are of Bulgarian nationality.

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1 posted on 12/19/2024 3:39:39 PM PST by nickcarraway

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2 posted on 12/19/2024 3:43:02 PM PST by drwoof

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3 posted on 12/19/2024 3:44:16 PM PST by BipolarBob (Enough of this talk about narcissists, let's get back to talking about me.)

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4 posted on 12/19/2024 3:50:59 PM PST by proxy_user

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