Associated Incidents
The international scam. Professionals in Italy, possible insiders abroad, accounts from Holland to Hong Kong. Defined roles: the minister, the official, the general. But also the accountant who makes the loot from the telephone raids disappear and the computer expert who with a clever game of mirrors makes the entrepreneur believe that someone from the Ministry of Defense is looking for him.
The accusations hypothesized by the Milan prosecutor's office are increasing, which is investigating the hits (attempted or successful) of the fake minister Guido Crosetto and his staff: with the excuse of needing to free Italian journalists kidnapped abroad, they called wealthy entrepreneurs to ask for hundreds of thousands of euros. In fact, work is underway to give faces and names to what appears to all intents and purposes to be a criminal association, composed of several people and specialized in large-scale fraud. According to investigators, the situation is aggravated by two reasons: the size of the amounts requested and the fact that the victims were "afraid of an imaginary danger or the mistaken belief that they had to carry out an order from the Authority". The investigation is also underway for impersonation, given that one of the scammers, in fact, impersonated the minister.
At the moment, there is one confirmed victim. Former Inter president Massimo Moratti, according to the reconstruction, paid two bank transfers for just under a million euros and reported the fraud to the police. The Beretta and Aleotti families also filed complaints](https://milano.repubblica.it/cronaca/2025/02/08/news/truffa_falso_crosetto_corsa_contro_tempo_denaro_finito_estero-423989764/), one was announced by Luxottica of the Del Vecchios, a complaint is coming from Esselunga, a similar move by Giorgio Armani is not excluded. Among the targets were also Marco Tronchetti Provera, Diego Della Valle, Patrizio Bertelli, husband of Miuccia Prada and president of the group, and the Caltagirone family. Work is underway to understand whether other large Italian entrepreneurs have paid.
The modus operandi appears similar in many cases: a ministry official, a certain Giovanni Montalbano, contacted the large groups to facilitate an urgent meeting with the self-styled minister Crosetto. Who explained the serious situation: journalists kidnapped in the Middle East, the need for private funds to free them by overcoming bureaucratic difficulties, the guarantee that everything would be returned in a few days by the Bank of Italy: "It is a very urgent matter, of national security. The Republic will be grateful to you...". In most of the cases that have emerged so far, the telephone attacks have crashed against the first trench of the giants targeted, that is, in front of the secretariats that did not put the self-styled politician in contact with the company's top management. But each case can provide interesting investigative ideas and for this reason we are heading towards a parade of big names in the prosecutor's office, representatives of big brands called to tell how it happened.
The investigations of the prosecutor Giovanni Tarzia and the investigative unit of the Carabinieri led by Colonels Antonio Coppola and Fabio Rufino, have so far allowed two accounts abroad to be blocked. The first in Holland, the same one where Moratti's instant transfer would have ended up, which however, unfortunately for him, would then bounce back to Hong Kong. Moral: actually recovering that money seems like a difficult task but it is also true that someone had to open those accounts, they had to provide a document (of course, maybe registered to a front man), they left traces, movements. Just as the gang's telephone signals left traces, that "bombardment" of phone calls to all the biggest entrepreneurs. Finally, we are waiting for the complaint from Minister Crosetto -- which he himself announced -- and which the prosecutors are waiting to read to add new pieces and try to catch the international scammer.