15 defendants are on trial in Marseille for a vast fraud with international ramifications in which the crooks posed as suppliers of the targeted companies (AFP/Archives/Damien MEYER, -)
Organized gang fraud, money laundering: 15 defendants are on trial this week in Marseille for a vast fraud with international ramifications, in the style of “the president’s scam”, in which the crooks, from Israel, pretended to be suppliers of targeted companies.
Four of the main protagonists have been the subject of an arrest warrant since 2022, their last known address being an address in Israel, where the call center at the heart of the operation carried out mainly in 2015-2016 was established.
As in the “president scam”, consisting of usurping the identity of a company manager to convince an employee to make a transfer, the operation involved identity theft, that of suppliers. The alleged creditors informed their “clients” of a change of bank domiciliation and demanded payment of real invoices.
Money often paid into a bank in Madrid, into one of the accounts of a company called Murta Community, but also in France, Romania, Bulgaria, Poland, Hong Kong…
For the investigators, the very precise method of operation implied a good knowledge of the target company. To do this, the scammers first called suppliers, pretending to be customers, in order to find out the amount of invoices coming due, before taking on the opposite role.
During an attempted fraud by Dassault Aviation, in Martignas (Gironde), the financial department was contacted by a certain “Patrick Montiel”, from Potez Aéronautique, to verify the correct receipt of a new RIB sent from Marseille by mail. The same “Patrick Montiel” – a recurring pseudonym in this file – had previously contacted Potez Aéronautique, posing as a Dassault manager, in order to be informed of the amount of the next invoices.
In this case, neither company was fooled.
– Laundries, slaughterhouses, nursing homes –
But others were trapped, notably by the accuracy of the amounts claimed, down to the cent.
The companies injured or victims of these attempted frauds were very diverse: laundries and hotels, a distributor of heating, bathroom, tiling and plumbing equipment, slaughterhouses, a nursing home, etc.
In total, 17 entities (companies or associations) throughout France have become civil parties in this trial scheduled until Friday.
Three of the defendants subject to an arrest warrant – Alain Lasserie, Wilfried El Baze and Stéphane Benhamou – were the kingpins of the call center in Israel, according to a co-defendant from Marseille, Emmanuel Fitoussi.
The latter, under judicial supervision since 2020, admitted to having worked in this center under the assumed name of “Patrick Montiel”, but as a simple employee, according to his statements.
His statements, as well as similar investigations carried out in Bordeaux and Nancy, led investigators to suspect Alain Lasserie of having been the mastermind of the scam and Stéphane Benhamou of having been the operator (computers, false email addresses, false RIB and supporting documents), while Wilfried El Baze allegedly recruited people responsible for opening ghost companies abroad, to which to transfer the fraudulently acquired funds.
MM. Fitoussi, El Baze, Lasserie and Benhamou have already been sentenced in December 2021 by the Bordeaux criminal court for organized gang fraud, in another aspect of this vast scam monitored by the economic and financial jurisdiction (jirs) of Bordeaux.
Also on the dock are a series of people, most of them domiciled in Marseille, suspected in particular of having allowed money to be laundered which passed through their bank accounts.
They are being prosecuted for complicity in fraud committed by an organized gang and/or money laundering.
© 2023 AFP
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