47-year old woman sentenced to eight years over phone scams
A 47-year-old woman was sentenced to eight years in prison by a Thessaloniki court on Monday, for her involvement in a network scamming people via telephone.
The criminal network mainly targeted elderly women, telling them that their close relatives had been involved in car accidents, and that they would need to pay large sums of money for supposed surgeries and other medical costs.
The 47-year-old Bulgarian national was found guilty on eight counts of fraud, which netted the network some €280,000.
Most of the scams had taken place in 2019, in Thessaloniki, but her involvement was only revealed four years later after a subsequent scam attempt, for which she had confessed.
While the woman admitted to partaking in the phone calls, she denied accusations of knowing about the fraud, arguing that she believed the amounts of cash and valuables she was collecting corresponded to debts owed to loan sharks and gambling debts that the victims had accumulated in her native Bulgaria.
She said that the cash and valuables were later forwarded to the responsible parties in Bulgaria, but police investigators have so far failed to locate them.
