“How much most vulnerable the person, the better.” With that crudeness, the head of investigation of the police station Sants-Montjuïc of the Mossos d’Esquadra describes the lack of scruples with which a group of eight people -four men and four women- who have cheated, stolen, threatened and in some cases also struck to 14 elders of Barcelonafrom between 72 and 95 years. Among its victims are also disabled people. They are “extremely serious” events, insists the sub-inspector. An 88-year-old woman had a glass of water held in front of her eyes and warned that they would smash it in your face if he did not deliver the pin of his bank card.
The group sneaked into the homes of the elderly, whom they had previously selected, making sure that they lived alone and that they were elderly, with the scam of the ‘false gas inspector’. With this criminal typology, thieves sneak into the victim’s home pretending that they work for their gas or electric company. They usually work in pairs, as in the case of this last gang, now disbanded, and while one of them pretends to inspect the boiler or the electrical panel, the buddy steals jewelry and valuables from the owners. If discovered, they do not hesitate to use violence and intimidation.
The researchers finally put the magnifying glass on these false inspectors of the gas, made up entirely of people from Peruvian nacionality middle-aged, in February 2023. A victim was assaulted and, seconds after they left his home, he was able to notify 112 and provide a description of two assailants, who were detained by a Catalan police patrol. They were caught with the victim’s jewelry in their pockets.
identified
Investigators from the Sants-Montjüic district had been looking for a group of ‘false gas inspectors’ who had attacked the elderly in their district since mid-2022. They had images of the suspects but had not yet been able to identify them. They were recordings from security cameras of the banks to which they went to empty the bank accounts of the elderly after stealing their bank cards. Thanks to the patrol’s red-handed arrest in February 2023, investigators identified two of them. And when they were released with charges after going to court for that act, the follow and the intervention of their telephones.
During this surveillance, the investigators were able to prove that there were eight people, that they always worked in pairs of men and women and that they acted with a high degree of coordination. They met in a bar near the homes where they intended to act, shared out the addresses and names of the victims, and then went to work. One of the women in charge of the calls stayed at the bar: she contacted the victims and informed them that the company’s inspectors were in the area and would pass by her residence in a few minutes. Thus thieves did not have to knock on cold doors.
confidential data
The Mossos have been able to prove that with this way of proceeding they have attacked 14 elderly people in Barcelona. They could be more. The eight thieves were arrested on May 30 and, after going to court, they were released again. The researchers lament that the old age of the victims will side with the criminals because it is possible that some of them will have died when the trial takes place or are more cognitively impaired. But they are confident that it can be proven that they were not just scammers but an organized group of violent thieves attacking very vulnerable victims.
In the case of the old woman who was threatened with breaking a glass of water in her face, it is proven that it happened as the woman recounted because the scientific police, after hearing her complaint, found suspect’s fingerprints in the glass in question.
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One of the details still unresolved and in the investigation phase is to clarify where they got the information they had on the victims. They knew their telephone numbers, their names, their address and also their age and that they lived without company. The agents trust that the emptying their mobile phones allows them to prove that they had illegal access to a database such as those held by large energy companies.
“They had no job, their trade was this: stealing from the elderly,” insists the head of the Sants-Montjüic investigation unit. This group, without counting the money amassed through the resale of jewelry, has obtained almost 60,000 euros from the bank accounts of the victims. “If they saw that they had money in the notebook, they lost their nerves and went to sack to get the pin,” he says. “For us it was a priority to arrest them, they attacked people who couldn’t defend themselves,” he denounces.