They thought to recover a suitcase full of cash and end up with "specimen" tickets. The national police alerted this Monday on a scam with counterfeit banknotes. Stamped "poker", "specimen" or even "Disneyland", fake tickets, the possession of which is legal and not subject to counterfeiting, are increasingly used for scams that can reach several hundreds of thousands of euros.
These "Monopoly tickets", which take the appearance of an official ticket but have a special mention, can be bought freely on the Internet "in mass and for not much", in particular "Chinese sites like Alibaba", explains Commissioner William Hippert, Head of the Information, Intelligence and Strategic Analysis Service on Organized Crime (Sirasco).
In 2021, 2,000 facsimile banknotes were seized by the police or handed over to the Banque de France, a "figure necessarily below reality", underlines the head of Sirasco.
In cash transactions involving large sums of money
These special denominations are not used so much to deceive the eye of the merchant as for scams of the “rip deal” or “rotten transaction” type: they are made during a cash transaction involving large sums of money to acquire real estate, precious jewelery or large quantities of goods.
In December, an individual sold more than 60,000 euros of gold ingots and ended up with bundles of 200 euros of banknotes with the inscription "poker", reports William Hippert.
In November, customs officers at the Modane border post discovered one million euros in facsimiles of 200 euros and an investigation was opened to identify a team specializing in the "rip-deal".
In March, near Mulhouse, a seller of luxury watches was given 80,000 euros in fake banknotes of 500 euros with the mention "specimen".
Meetings in major hotels
The modus operandi of the crooks, often from the Balkans, is particularly well established to give victims confidence.
Dressed up to the nines, they meet sellers - contacted via specialized sites or by word of mouth - in salons of major Parisian hotels, on the Côte d'Azur or abroad, such as Switzerland. , Monaco, Hong-Kong or Singapore.
Cash transactions "can reach a million euros," says William Hippert.
A "sleight of hand"
The buyers, who often come in groups, then present real tickets in a bag, which they circulate among themselves to deceive the seller's vigilance and finally give him false cash.
“Everything is based on cunning and almost conjuring,” notes the commissioner.
"By the time the victim realizes the sleight of hand by opening the briefcase in the hotel room, the crooks have already disappeared" and the filing of a complaint is not systematic because "the goods have not all have been declared to the tax authorities, ”he adds.
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