The system was well established. Four men aged 23 to 41 were tried by the Thionville Criminal Court on Tuesday 11 October for defrauding or attempting to defraud 21 supermarkets in the Moselle, Meurthe-et-Moselle and Moselle between 2019 and 2020. Only one was here I’m. The oldest. The case begins in 2020. Several shops are victims of fraud with forged checks and false identity documents that defeat security checks. An artisanal work. The damage is significant as it concerns, for the most part, household appliances and bottles of alcohol.
A € 1,500 kit
A gendarmerie investigation opens which will quickly focus on a 23-year-old forger, originally from Thionville, already convicted of providing “customers” with “kits” containing false identity documents and forged checks. In his statements, Thionvillois, confused by his telephony, will explain to investigators that he had purchased (real) bank account numbers on the darknet, which he then exploited to produce counterfeit documents using a magnetic ink printer. These kits (an identity document and five or six homonymous checks by Crédit Agricole or BNP Paribas), sold for 1,500 euros, would have earned him 25,000 euros, according to his statements.
Once the supplier was identified, the police had only to go back to their customers, the same people who would defraud twenty stores in six months.
The defendant, one of the forger’s “clients”, tries to minimize his involvement in the courtroom bar. Suspected of using four different identities, he only recognizes one. Likewise, he claims he does not know the other defendants despite CCTV footage showing them working in pairs. Ten thousand euros, that’s what his scams would bring him. He explains to the court that he has been caught in a spiral and owes a lot of money. “I did it because others were doing it and it seemed easy,” says the father who lives in Fameck.
The prosecutor asked him for twelve months of imprisonment with a two-year suspension of probation and a fine of € 10,000. Twelve months and ten months of suspended sentences were also requested against his partners. As for the counterfeiter, who in this case presented himself for complicity in fraud for recidivism, the prosecutor asked for thirty months with the suspension of the two-year trial.
The decision was confidential. The sentence will be delivered on November 15th.
