Associated Incidents
Some of Italy's biggest businessmen have been victims of an attempted fraud by a group of criminals who used an artificial intelligence program to simulate the voice of the Minister of Defense, Guido Crosetto, and asked them to hand over large sums of money supposedly intended to facilitate the release of Italian journalists kidnapped in Iran and Syria. In the phone calls they received, they were promised that the funds would then be returned to them via the Bank of Italy. At least one businessman, Massimo Moratti, former president of the oil company Saras and the Inter Milan football club, is said to have sent nearly a million euros to the criminals via international transfers. "It all seemed absolutely true. It is something that can happen, even if one does not expect it. But it happens to everyone," Moratti explained in an interview with the newspaper 'La Repubblica'.
The former Inter president was the first to report the fraud to the Carabinieri last week and since then at least three other important businessmen have reportedly turned to the security forces to admit that they had also been victims of the scam, according to Italian media reports. The criminals are said to have come into contact with some of the country's best-known businessmen, such as designer Giorgio Armani, Diego Della Valle, owner of Tod's, or the Caltagirone and Beretta families, known for their interests in construction and arms manufacturing, respectively. Other possible victims were the Del Vecchio, owners of the multinational optics company Luxottica, and the Caprotti, owners of the Esselunga supermarket chain.
No money trail
Crosetto himself announced that he is going to file a complaint against these "professional fraudsters", who, as he admitted on the television channel Rete Quattro, have shown great technological skill in plagiarizing his voice and coming into contact with some of the biggest fortunes in Italy. "These businessmen are people who, out of love for their country, were willing to make a transfer if a minister asked them to. We must sound the alarm, because there are people who keep falling for it," he said. In fact, since the news broke, the list of alleged victims has not stopped growing and Moretti has even admitted that he continues to receive calls in which the criminals asked for new sums of money.
The Milan prosecutor's office has opened an investigation for international fraud while trying to block the bank accounts, registered in various European countries and in Hong Kong, where the transfers of the defrauded businessmen were made. So far, it has not been possible to recover the money, which is feared to have ended up in a financial institution in a tax haven. Investigators have discovered that the criminals used cloned landline numbers, one of them with a Rome prefix and compatible with those used by the Ministry of Defense where Crosetto works. To deceive the businessmen, they used the recent case of Cecilia Sala, the Italian journalist imprisoned in Tehran and released on January 8 after Giorgia Meloni's government promised to release from prison an Iranian citizen who had been detained at the request of the United States.