Associated Incidents
The complaint of the Minister of Defense Guido Crosetto has been filed with the Carabinieri, in which he explains, in more detail than he had already done on social media, the telephone scam to the detriment of the elite of Italian business and finance. The minister himself had already announced last Sunday that he would file the complaint. The complaint has reached the Carabinieri and will soon be forwarded to the Public Prosecutor's Office in Milan, where it will be filed in the file of the PM Giovanni Tarzia, coordinated by the prosecutor Marcello Viola. What was written down in black and white by Crosetto, the injured party in the crime of impersonation, does not currently require a personal hearing in the coming days.
The complaint reconstructs how the group - using the name of the minister, his staff or a general - allegedly attempted to collect millions of euros in exchange for a ransom to free phantom journalists held hostage in the Middle East.
In the first post on his social media, the minister wrote: "I prefer to make the facts public so that no one runs the risk of falling into the trap." He himself had advised Massimo Moratti to run and explain to the police what the entrepreneur had told him, when by then he had already accepted the request of Crosetto's fake staff to send two transfers of 450,000 euros each to Holland (update: the money has been recovered). The investigators had thus had the chance to start the investigations at times when the scammers still did not imagine they had been "perceived" and indeed were still "normally" continuing to cast the telephone hook among wealthy entrepreneurs.
With Crosetto's complaint, therefore, the number of complaints in the investigation has risen to seven in total. There are complaints for the attempted deception filed by Luxottica-Del Vecchio family, by the Beretta and Aleotti families and by Esselunga-Caprotti family, in addition of course to the one for the fraud against Massimo Moratti, who paid just over 900 thousand euros, divided into two transfers, to a Dutch account. Then, there is also that of Marco Tronchetti Provera: he too is said to have received a phone call from the fake Crosetto, but did not fall into the trap.
In addition, other complaints could be added, always for attempted fraud, from entrepreneurs whose names have emerged in recent days, such as Diego Della Valle, Patrizio Bertelli, husband of Miuccia Prada and president of the group, the Caltagirone family and Giorgio Armani. The investigation is for criminal association aimed at aggravated fraud and impersonation and the investigators are hunting for the group, the money and the traces of the financial movements also with international rogatory letters. They are waiting for answers regarding the Dutch account to find out if the money from those two transfers from Moratti is still inside and if anything else has arrived. This could lead to the hypothesis that other scams have been carried out. If they manage to block the account in Hong Kong, it will be possible to understand if payments have arrived there too.