“I’ve been preparing for this for years, on Ash Wednesday at 9.30 a.m. the time had come,” Manfred Wirth reported in the Himmelstadt town hall meeting of a very special shock phone call. A female voice asked if he was Manfred Wirth, after he said yes, he was told that his daughter had caused a serious traffic accident in which a 28-year-old cyclist had died.
The man from Himmelstadt was a police officer for 42 years, the last 25 years with the criminal police in Würzburg and he is involved in the Weißer Ring (an organization that helps victims of crime). For a long time he had hoped to put such scammers under lock and key. “Of course I was terribly shocked,” said Wirth with a wink. Despite the very serious topic, his lecture was relaxed and nonchalant. He also signaled his wife, who called the police on another phone, so that most of the shock call was even recorded.
“What are you imagining?”
Manfred Wirth to shock callers
“What, Marianne?” he asked, which was promptly answered in the affirmative. And that he now faces imprisonment unless someone posts high bail. “What are you imagining?” He asked desperately and was given 30,000 euros. “I don’t have that much,” he sobbed, mentioning 20,000 euros and informing his wife, who had just come from hanging out the laundry, “Our daughter had an accident.” The caller then asked him if it was Klara (both names are in the phone book) and if he had the money at home, to which he always said yes. After that he had to get the money and count it over the phone.
He had prepared a few real banknotes for this purpose, but of course no 200 100-euro notes. When that was done, the woman on the other end of the line asked if he had any jewelry, which he said no, or more money. After all, the cyclist who killed his daughter was four months pregnant. He could still raise 1,000 euros, he stammered, so Wirth, which the other side, after consultation with judge Dr. Bach (who, unsurprisingly, does not even exist at the Würzburg Regional Court).
Now it was said that he should take the money to Würzburg, to an office on the second floor of the courthouse. The caller also asked if he had a cell phone and called him on it. “So now two communication channels were blocked,” Wirth remarked dryly at the citizens’ meeting. He then got into the car with the purported money bag and drove off, before Retzbach and at Thüngersheim the caller spoke to him again. Plainclothes police officers would have had him in their sights, as he now knows.
“I was standing in front of the Justice Center and nobody was interested in me.”
Manfred Wirth regrets that no scammers came
Unfortunately, the scammers would have broken off the matter. “I was standing in front of the justice center and nobody was interested in me,” said Wirth. So he took the prepared money bag with a bundle of pieces of paper and a flyer from the White Ring in it, which his “invisible companions” also regretted very much. He can only guess why no money was handed over, maybe the gang had researched who they were dealing with.
The former police officer is not surprised that the conversation lasted so long. The potential money collector was probably never in Würzburg, but would have had to drive there first, for example from Frankfurt or Nuremberg. It was a consolation for him that the caller could not rob anyone else of money or valuables during this time. Because the criminals continued happily, such gangs would have stolen several million euros in 2022.
Manfred Wirth knows of a lady from the Würzburg area who has been called three times and each time “tricked” the person collecting the money. Nevertheless, he advises everyone to simply hang up, which is the safest method. Then you can call the relatives who are supposed to be in distress and it is very likely that everything will disappear into thin air. The perpetrators are psychologically very adept, Wirth knows that their victims even include a former judge.
