August M
Trusting the people who are supposed to protect us is a basic human instinct.
When scammers exploit that trust by posing as police officers, the consequences can shatter lives across borders, TV 2 News reports.
Sweet tooth trap
A massive international phone scam has unraveled in a surprisingly ordinary place. A Danish woman has just been sentenced to two years and six months in prison by a Norwegian court for conning an elderly woman.
The Nordmøre and Romsdal District Court found 58-year-old Cristina Matras guilty of fraud, according to TV 2 News. Investigators tracked her down through a bizarre clue left at a supermarket.
The 77-year-old victim remembered that the scammer had a major craving for a chocolate hazelnut spread called Nøtte. Police checked supermarket security footage in Molde and found Matras buying six tubs of the spread with her own credit card.
Fake police trap
The scheme was highly coordinated. Scammers first called the victim pretending to be from the special police unit Kripos. Matras then visited the victim under a fake name, claiming to be an Interpol agent.
She manipulated the elderly woman into keeping quiet and transferring roughly $450,000 to a Turkish bank account. Matras even lured her into traveling to Turkey before the victim realized the truth and called her family.
The victim’s legal counsel, Peter Engebjerg, told TV 2 that the fraud had massive consequences. He explained that “She was manipulated into believing that they were almost friends. This has subsequently made it difficult for her to distinguish reality from fiction.”
A massive ring
Matras previously received a four-and-a-half-year sentence for her role in Denmark’s largest telephone fraud case, where victims lost around $1.4 million. TV 2 exposed her past actions in a documentary titled ‘The Fake Police Commissioner’.
The trained nurse claimed she was forced into the scam by an international criminal ring. According to the local newspaper Romsdal Budstikke, she told the court, “I was ordered to do what I had to do.”
Fortunately, the Norwegian victim recovered her $450,000 after authorities froze the foreign account.
Sources: TV 2 News, Romsdal Budstikke
