Moravia scammer cheats 44 online sellers out of nearly 600,000 crowns

Detectives in the Moravian-Silesian Region have solved 44 cases of fraud: a 19-year-old woman collected goods from sellers who had advertised them online and did not pay. She cheated people in Havířov, Český Těšín, Opava, Ostrava and other towns in the region, and the total damage, according to police, came to almost 600,000 crowns.

She always followed the same scheme: she found an ad, arranged a face-to-face meeting by phone and took the goods without handing over any money. Most often these were phones, tablets and laptops, as well as an e-bike, tools and household chemicals. She pretended to the sellers that she had already paid, or promised to send the money through online banking, but it never reached the sellers' accounts.

Sometimes sellers created a QR code for payment themselves, but that did not stop her either. She scanned the code, the payment again failed to arrive, and on the spot she explained that she had a foreign bank and the transfer was taking longer. Sellers usually believed her and handed over the goods.

Police charged the young woman with fraud. She admitted guilt: by her own account, she used the household chemicals herself and sold the other items to spend the money on food and housing. She is being prosecuted in custody, and if convicted she faces up to five years in prison.

A representative of the economic crime department of the Police Presidium warned that the number of online crimes, especially fraud, has risen sharply in recent years, and that attacks are becoming ever more sophisticated and frequent. For scammers, he said, classified-ad sites and flea-market platforms are a real gold mine.

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Around Prague, based on reporting by novinky.cz