The Mossos have arrested twice in less than a month in Barcelona a 27-year-old scammer who, posing as the son of a billionaire, managed to get 300,000 euros with the alleged rental of luxury homes.
The young man was arrested after renting, with false international bank transfers and falsified documentation, villas, high standing apartments, duplex penthouses and suites in luxury hotels in Barcelona. To do this, he convinced his victims to be a businessman of high purchasing power and son of an American billionaire, reports the Catalan police.
Subsequently, he offered parties in rented homes with the aim of seducing his guests and making them believe lies that allowed him to gain prestige and become a person with influence and with a life surrounded by wealth and great pleasures.
The Catalan police have reported that the arrested, with a history of similar scams in Madrid, has been released on both occasions after going to court.
The first case of scam that the Mossos had news of took place on February 14, when a woman reported that, through the real estate agency that managed her rental home, a new client had contacted her to rent the ground floor of the house. The agency informed her that the person was trustworthy, since he had also carried out operations with the real estate company in Madrid, so the woman authorized the contract.
As a condition for the signing of the contract, with a duration of eighteen months, the man proposed to sleep two nights in the house to make sure that the place really interested him. The man lived in the house for a weekend, during which he held parties and meals with all kinds of people before disappearing, without paying the bail or the real estate fees.
The Mossos, two days after this complaint, knew a second scam, in this case for the rent for a month of a villa located in the upper part of the city with a cost of 16,500 euros. For this case, the scammer explained that it was a man living in Canada and that he had traveled to Barcelona to collect his mother's inheritance, and also presented false documentation. With all this, the man managed to settle several weeks in the villa without the owners collecting the agreed rent.
The investigation of the Mossos allowed to know that on May 4 of last year a complaint had also been filed for a similar scam in Sitges (Barcelona) for the rent three days of a villa contracted with false documentation and an alleged international bank transfer. The Mossos managed to arrest the fraudster on February 16, who after going to court was released.
A month later, on March 13, the Catalan police received a new complaint after a man who had contacted a real estate agency managed to rent a duplex penthouse in a central luxury hotel for one year for 22,400 euros per month. In this case, the police managed to find the scammer in the duplex penthouse that he had not yet paid, accompanied by a young woman who explained that, previously, they had been living in a luxury apartment located on Passeig de Gràcia in Barcelona.
Investigators do not rule out that this man is linked to other scams in similar circumstances.
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