Prosecutors from the Prosecutor’s Office for Combating Organized Crime and Special Cases (PCCOCS), together with officers from the National Investigation Inspectorate (INI) and the police, have completed the criminal prosecution of four people accused of obtaining an apartment in Chisinau estimated at over 800,000 lei by an alleged heir in 2021 through deception.

The defendants are three women and one man from Chisinau, aged between 37 and 67. They include the woman who organised and benefited from the fraud – a 63-year-old citizen of Moldova and Russia.

“She knew the victim (born in 1938) from the time when her father was in a cohabiting relationship with the owner of the apartment. The only potential legal heir to the flat was the victim’s nephew, who was serving a prison sentence for a crime he had committed.

Some time before the landlady’s death in spring 2021, the woman in an organisational role who regularly visited her came into possession of her identity papers and withheld them. Thus, the landlady was unable to start the procedures for the completion of the will of heir for her grandson.

Instead, two months after the owner’s death, the woman who organised the scam persuaded the other three defendants to accept the role of witnesses to the writing of the will in the owner’s name, with a date prior to her death but with her forged signature. The will, therefore, was written for the benefit of the main defendant and was presented to the notary, where on the basis of false statements of the witnesses indicated in the act, the main defendant became the owner of the apartment, by deception,” a PCCOCS statement said.

The apartment and bank accounts of the defendant are being seized at the request of PCCOCS prosecutors. Previously, the accused organizer had been placed under house arrest, but the prosecutors’ request for preventive detention was rejected – a measure that has remained in force until now.

According to the law, fraud committed in these circumstances is punishable by 7 to 10 years’ imprisonment and, until a final court ruling, the defendants are presumed innocent as a procedural right guaranteed by law.