Munich, March 19, (dpa/GNA) – A 21-year-old German man who realized he had been targeted by a fraud call, resorted to unusual means to help bust the scammers.
He developed a complex plot and pretended to be an older lady, even dressing up for a fake handover of bait he laid in his garden.
The Bavarian man, based in the town of Ahorntal, received a call on Wednesday by someone pretending to be a prosecutor, police said.
The caller told the young man that one of his relatives had caused a fatal accident, and asked him to pay bail to keep the relative out of jail.
Realizing he was being targeted by scammers, the man pretended to be an elderly woman, and managed to keep the criminals on the phone for several hours.
When the scammers asked him to hand over the money in person, the man dressed up with an apron and a headscarf, and met at an agreed location in the Oberfranken region to hand over a bag containing nothing of value, enabling the police to arrest a suspect at the scene.
It was initially unclear whether the suspect was part of a gang of fraudsters, suspected to be operating in the region.
Police in Oberfranken recorded a total of 22 cases of scam call fraud on Wednesday, with perpetrators able to get their victims to hand over money on two occasions.
An elderly lady deposited €10,000 ($11,500) in the city of Bayreuth, while a couple left a low five-digit sum for scammers to pick up from their garden fence in the nearby town of Eckersdorf.
GNA