Preying on victims
A UK court has sentenced four men to prison for posing as detectives investigating gambling scam victims to hide their true motive.
According to reports on Tuesday, Christopher Call, 36, and Charles Palmer, 43, masterminded the detectives scheme. The pair allegedly impersonated officers offering previous victims of gambling fraud compensation.
private investigators and detectives who could get their money back”
Call and Palmer’s scheme involved texting victims of prior gambling and horseracing scams stating they were “private investigators and detectives who could get their money back.”
According to reports, the gang fleeced £110,180 ($150,380) off of two women and a man using this modus operandi.
One too many
News reports reveal how much the repeat victims lost to the scam, with one woman who had previously been duped out of £20,000 ($27,307) ending up paying out £82,500 ($112,627) to the fake cops.
Call and Palmer fleeced another already scammed woman out of £21,000 ($28,666) and a 79-year-old man out of £6,680 ($9,118). The man had previously lost about £20,000 to scammers.
The gang’s scheme, however, began to unravel with the fourth targeted victim. The intended victim, another woman, had already been scammed out of £183,000 ($250,000) in a horse racing con.
Persistent attempts by the schemers to get the woman to pony up money to purportedly recover funds from her previous scam led her to raise suspicions about the gang.
While no details were given as to how the gang was able to find the victims of previous scams, Judge Francis Laird KC slammed their behavior of preying on “desperate” people.
Gang going away
Judge Laird handed all four men involved in the scheme prison terms.
Call’s term was four years, three months for the detectives’ scam, with two years, three months added on for fraudulent trading. Palmer was sentenced to four and a half years for conspiracy to defraud. Kevin Ratcliffe was given 20 months in jail for loaning a Bentley to Call and Palmer to give an “impression of legitimacy to the fake detectives.”
Joseph Holden was sentenced to two years, three months for his role in “managing the financial accounts of the scam, collecting money from the victims.”
