Czech woman swindled nearly 1.5 million crowns from neighbors

A Czech court has ordered a woman named Kašáková to pay nearly one and a half million crowns to seven victims — her acquaintances and neighbors. The ruling has already taken legal effect: the woman swindled money out of people by promising to repay it quickly, then failed to return a single crown for years.

According to the case file, Kašáková persuaded acquaintances and neighbors to lend her money under various pretexts. She told some that she urgently needed to pay an insurance surcharge in Germany in order to receive a multi-million payout. Others she won over with a sob story about her daughter, whose husband had allegedly cleaned out her bank account and left her penniless.

With each victim, the woman signed a written agreement promising to repay the debt within a short period. When the agreed deadline passed, she did not hand over the money and simply came up with new excuses.

“When taking out the loans, she misled the victims with promises of a quick repayment, even though she must have known that promise was unrealistic. It cannot be ruled out that she herself was also deceived, but that does not absolve her of responsibility for deceiving the victims,” the public prosecutor said.

The defendant herself told the court that she had lost all her savings because of an acquaintance from England who, she said, swindled a total of 650,000 crowns out of her during 2023.

“I’m very sorry. I will try to pay this money back to people. I’m already looking for a job and talking to my daughter about whether she can help me with the payments somehow,” Kašáková admitted with difficulty.

Around Prague, based on reporting by novinky.cz