William Molinié 06h18, February 21, 2023

After a slowdown in their activity in France, due to the Covid-19 epidemic, gangs from the Irish Traveler community are back on the territory.

Thefts, scams and trafficking of all kinds are the signature of these teams which organize raids in France.

They have their own codes and their own dialect, Shelta, a mixture of Gaelic and Irish.

Detected in the 1990s, Irish gangs from the Traveler community have been exported all over Europe.

If the "Irish Traveller's" were recognized as an ethnic minority in 2017 by the Irish government, a criminalized fringe has specialized in serial thefts and scams.

They act as a family, with clan leaders in a very pyramidal organization.

According to a recent note from the central direction of the judicial police (DCPJ), which Europe 1 consulted, this crime is "regularly increasing".

If the Covid-19 epidemic has resulted in a slowdown in their activity, "although certain organized criminal groups have continued their journeys by circumventing travel restrictions", write the police, the year 2022 has started again. .

Fraud and theft of all kinds

In this count from the Information, Intelligence and Strategic Analysis Service on Organized Crime (SIRASCO), analysts establish that last year, "816 Irish or British nationals were involved in criminal acts in France ", compared to 616 in 2021, an increase of 32.5%.

In detail, it is above all the Ile-de-France region that suffers this type of crime with 3,260 incidents recorded between 2012 and 2022, then the North (2,155 incidents), the South (1,900 incidents) and the West (1,336 facts).

Of Catholic denomination, the gangs resulting from the "Irish Traveller's" have distinguished themselves for ages by a modus operandi of their own.

The one that the police have nicknamed the "false bitumen" scam, especially identified in sparsely populated, rural and semi-urban areas.

They present themselves to the victims as employees of the construction industry and offer to resell them at a good price a surplus of tar from the construction sites.

The victims are mostly elderly people and only discover the trickery afterward.

Like this Angevin who paid the sum of 2,600 euros to two men with a strong English accent to tar the way to his property before realizing that the asphalt was in fact only gravel.

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Reception bases in France

These gangs, settled in Ireland, have an itinerant lifestyle abroad.

And now embrace other criminal niches, such as fake tourist scams on motorway service areas, drug trafficking, ivory, rhinoceros horn or jade.

They also raid city sidewalks to steal catalytic converters that contain rare metals.

In February 2022, several "Irish Traveller's" were arrested in Ile-de-France, for thefts committed in Marne, Burgundy and the Rhône Valley.

During their visits to France, these criminals stop in reception areas for travellers.

The police now suspect certain clans of having established themselves permanently in France and serving as reception bases for teams that move between Ireland and all of Western Europe.