Police posers target elderly victims

TALLINN - On Friday, the Harju County Court arrested three Lithuanian citizens who are suspected of posing as police officers to Russian-speaking elderly people and extorting money from them, reports National Broadcasting. The police on June 2 detained 19-year-old Alik, 33-year-old Sergei, 28-year-old Tatyana and a 15-year-old young man. The prosecutor in charge of the case requested that the former three be taken into custody, as they might try to avoid criminal proceedings or continue committing new crimes if they were to be kept free.

These Lithuanian citizens are suspected of having used a fraudulent scheme whereby one of them would call the victim, introducing themselves as a police officer and saying that the victim’s family member has caused an accident. The caller would then try to extort a rather large amount of money from the victim, saying that the payoff would be necessary to avoid criminal proceedings, or paying for “accident victims.”

“Without exception, the victims of the fraud are elderly Russian-speaking persons,” noted the Northern Circuit Prosecutor’s Office prosecutor Dmitri Teplykh. According to him, the amounts of money the victims have paid to the suspects vary, the biggest among them being more than 100,000 kroons (6,400 euros).

By now, the police have received dozens of statements of contacts with similar schemes. Although the so-called fraud-police scheme is well-known to the police and the prosecutor’s office, the head of the financial crimes division of the Northern Circuit Police Prefecture Rain Kuus stated that the acts of fraud have become increasingly conspiratorial over the years, and their steps are now much better planned.

Similar phony-police officers were particularly active across Estonia during spring and summer of 2008, when hundreds of elderly Russian-speaking individuals fell victim to them.