Czech investment scam: fraudsters take nine million crowns

Fraudsters have swindled a Czech man out of nine million crowns by promising quick riches from investments. He handed part of the money in person to a courier in Příbram. Police detained the courier at the end of September, and a court expelled him from the country for five years.

In mid-May the man was drawn to a social media ad promising profitable stock investments and fast wealth. He responded, and a stranger contacted him and told him to transfer three million crowns to a newly opened account, from which cryptocurrency was to be bought.

“The unknown offender then forwarded the money to his own crypto wallet and told the victim that his investment had grown to several tens of millions of crowns,” police spokeswoman Michaela Richterová said on Thursday.

Millions in cash on the street

The scammers then, under various pretexts such as identity verification, made the trusting man take out a loan of 900,000 crowns and sign an unfavourable sale-and-leaseback contract on a property for five million. In both cases he handed the money over in cash to a courier right on the street.

The criminals kept inventing new, similar stories, demanding that he send or hand over money again, but the promised profit never came. In the end the man lost patience, realised he had most likely been the victim of a fraud, and went to the police.

Courier expelled from the country

The series of cash handovers was stopped by investigators: at the end of September, at another meeting between the man and the courier, this time under police supervision, they detained the middleman. The 21-year-old foreign national, whose nationality police did not disclose, was dealt with in a summary procedure, after which a court expelled him for five years for money laundering. Police are continuing to investigate the case, in which the courier was only one link in a criminal chain.

Similar investment scams also appear on social media disguised as news sites: fraudsters copy the design and logo of a major media outlet to build trust, then slip in “guaranteed investment tips”. A fake can be spotted by the browser address bar, which shows a completely different domain, and by the section links in the header, which do not work.

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Around Prague, based on reporting by novinky.cz