Fooled older women for their savings

FREDRIKSTAD (Dagbladet): The picture from the surveillance camera, which Dagbladet has gained access to, shows four men in a stairwell. According to the police, they are on their way out of an apartment on Grünerløkka in Oslo. The apartment is said to have been one of many bases that the league has used to trick older women into entering the code for their bank card.

Four people. A Norwegian, two Swedes and a Dane, have been arrested and charged in the case. According to the police, the accused deny that they know each other, despite the fact that they are pictured together on their way out of the apartment.

78 older women have so far been identified who have been tricked into entering the social security number, account number and code of the ID card. The first fraud police have on their long list dates back to September 2019.

– When we open a door, we come to a new corridor with a long line of new, unopened doors.

This is how police attorney Yvonne Schilling describes the investigation, which has been named the Olga scam. The gang has targeted older women and is said to have lured more than 16 million from the vulnerable group. Dagbladet has been in contact with the accused’s defenders, but no one wants to comment on the case at the present time.

Shameful

Two assistance lawyers have been appointed to help the many victims through the process.

Marianne Weel Kreutz and Hilde Jæger are now working through the increasingly long list of victims in the case.

– The ladies feel ashamed, offended, stupid. Embarrassed to have come into such a situation, says Hilde Jæger.

– They feel sad, angry and frustrated, says Marianne Weel Kreutz.

Both say that several have explained that they trusted the man who called and that they had been in a long-term customer relationship with that bank

– In addition, many of them have suffered large financial losses and some do not get the loss covered by the banks, says Jæger.

She cites an example where the aggrieved party is a minimum pensioner who had saved 500,000 kroner together with his now deceased spouse. The bank does not cover the loss.

Dagbladet has previously been in contact with Dnb, which states that they have covered all losses that their customers have had in meeting with the fraudsters.

– The banks have different practices, Jæger tells Dagbladet and now asks the banks that have not covered the loss for the older women to take a new assessment.

Both boast of the work that two investigators at Fredrikstad police station have done.

– All salutes to the police in Fredrikstad. It is important that this case comes to light, say the assistance lawyers.

Sport

In the next photo from the surveillance camera, which is an important part of the police investigation, two of the accused are on their way into the same apartment. Now they have with them two people who the police believe are “mules”. Both persons have been identified by the police.

More than 100 “mules” are said to have helped withdraw cash from ATMs and move money around in accounts. Many of these belong to criminal circles in Oslo.

According to investigators in Fredrikstad, several clues in the case point to sweet brother and criminal circles in Sweden.

– This is an organized gang with deep roots in Sweden who have come to Norway to commit crime.

About the Norwegian man who is charged in the case, Yvonne Schilling says the following:

– They needed a Norwegian to carry out the frauds.

Sweden

Dagbladet has gained access to the Swedish police documents from the revelation of a Swedish gang. The method is the same.

Elderly people are contacted by people who pretend to work in a bank and are persuaded to give out sensitive information over the phone. In photos that the police presented as evidence in the trial that took place in Ystad District Court in southern Sweden last year, you see the swindlers mashing themselves with expensive watches and jewelery. The luxury goods are allegedly bought on blocket.se, the Swedish version of Finn.no, to launder the money.

After 2017, the savindel method has been widely used, Aftonbladet wrote when they discussed the case last year,

Avisa estimated in 2019 that more than 90 million Swedish kroner had ended up in the hands of the villains using the same mode that the Olga scammers used in Norway.

But despite the fact that the case received a lot of attention in Sweden, several criminals have used the method. Recently, the same newspaper was able to reveal that gangsters from Rinkeby outside Stockholm swung on Stureplan with a lot of money in their pockets. Swedish police noted that the criminal gangs could have been given a new “source of income”.

Two people with connections to hard criminal networks are now charged in Stockholm for being behind more than 300 attempted frauds, as well as having defrauded millions of kroner from the elderly.

More victims

The third photo, which the police have given Dagbladet has gained access to from the extensive investigation material, shows two of the main accused leaving the apartment building on Grünerløkka. One person has a carrier on a PC bag. Police believe the photo was taken 15 minutes after a completed Olga scam.

In June, the Norwegian and one of the Swedes were caught red-handed while working from a hotel room in Oslo.

The police want to target the four accused under the mafia section, a provision in the penal code that doubles the penalty if the police manage to prove that the crime was organized.

Now the police in Fredrikstad are going through closed cases from all over the country to find more victims.

– Several “Olgaer” have tried to report similar incidents, but have not been allowed. On several occasions, only a note has been written at the police station. It is unfortunate for the investigation of such cases because you do not get information otherwise you can not refuse people to submit a report, says one of the two investigators who have had the main responsibility.

She believes it is incredibly important to report fraud cases.

– Conditions where more than a million kroner has been defrauded have not been investigated, the police attorney says, and says that they find a lot of useful information in the closed cases

The police in Fredrikstad have now received assistance from most of Norway’s police districts to conduct so-called judicial interrogations of the many victims in the case.

– In the smaller police districts, we experience great goodwill to assist with judicial questioning of women, says Yvonne Schilling and highlights Lofoten, Møre og Romsdal, Finnmark, Troms and Sør-Vest police districts.

The case is nearing completion and Schilling envisages that it will come to court in the spring and that it will go over a couple of months.