Agents of the National Police arrested a man and a woman, aged 50 and 37 respectively, both with police records, as alleged perpetrators of the crimes of fraud and money laundering.
The third person allegedly responsible, a resident of the Tenerife capital who reported being the victim of a 21,000-euro scam, died during the investigation by the National Police.
His bank claims 21,000 euros
At the beginning of 2021, a 65-year-old woman reported having been the victim of a scam. She suspected that the man and woman who cared for her at her home after her surgery had had access through her mobile phone to her bank accounts.
A month later, while the investigation was progressing, the complainant was summoned by a Marbella Court as an investigator, for her alleged participation in a crime of fraud in the process of buying a vehicle.
The complainant, allegedly, had been the recipient of the 15,000 euros scammed from a Swedish citizen in Marbella in the summer of 2020.
He received an email supplanting that of the seller of the house of purchase and sale of vehicles. That email included the current account of the neighbor in the capital of Tenerife, in which the money for the purchase had to be deposited.
As usual in these cases, the email differed by just one letter from the person who actually sold the car, so when it was read, it invited deception.
The agents, having these new data, found that, only in the month in which the scam occurred in Marbella, there were movements worth more than 36,000 euros in the complainant’s current account.
The investigation uncovers a crime of money laundering
The national police, given these new circumstances, investigated the current accounts of the three involved. Thus, they verified the existence of movements from the account of the sixty-year-old to the accounts of the couple who cared for her during the postoperative period.
He had transferred 13,000 euros to the man’s account and more than 6,000 to the woman’s. In addition, the three current accounts had made transfers to other accounts domiciled in places as disparate as China, Mexico or Slovakia, worth more than 25,000 euros.
This procedure is the usual one in money laundering from criminal acts. The receiver of the money to be laundered profits from a part of it and transfers the rest to different points to make it difficult to investigate its origin.
The investigators concluded that they were facing the possible crimes of fraud and money laundering, allegedly committed in collusion by the complainant herself and those whom she had identified as suspects in her initial complaint.
Once they had gathered the evidence, the agents proceeded to arrest the suspicious couple, reporting everything to the competent judicial authority.
The actions were carried out by national police officers from the Investigation Group of the North District Police Station of Santa Cruz de Tenerife.
