The Prosecutor’s Office for Combating Organized Crime (PCCOCS) announces on Tuesday, August 29, the indictment of a 20-year-old from Soroca for falsely taking out loans in the names of 36 people.

The victims were defrauded of more than 750 thousand lei since January 2023, and most of the cases took place in March in several districts of the country. According to PCCOCS, most of the victims are students at colleges in the capital, as well as a severely disabled man.

“In the spring, victims were told by a credit company that they owed about 20,000 lei each; and in some cases about 9,000 or 45 thousand lei. Therefore, as PCCOCS prosecutors announced in May, they filed criminal complaints, and the defendant and his accomplices began to be investigated by law enforcement officers.

They claimed that they needed to receive money transfers from abroad and that the permissible limit had been exceeded.  To this end, the victims were asked to give them their personal details from their identity card, then they photographed their faces from several angles, after which they “thanked” them with 200-300 lei each for their help.

In reality, the defendant asked them for this information in order to create an account with the credit company via the phone application. He then electronically filled out a company form on behalf of the victims without their knowledge. Within a few days, and sometimes the same day, he received the company’s approval and withdrew the money from the ATM,” a statement from the prosecution said.

The young man is a secondary school graduate, and was previously indicted for another scam and obtaining credit by fraud. He pleads guilty as the ringleader and criminal investigations are continuing into two other young men and two young women.

“He spent the money withdrawn from ATMs both for personal needs and for entertainment, including renting luxury cars (for example, at the meeting with a victim, he showed up driving a Porsche),” the statement said.

At the request of the PCCOCS prosecutors, he was placed in pre-trial detention pending the decision of the Buiucani court in Chisinau.

According to the law, fraud committed under these circumstances is punishable by a fine of 42,500-67,500 lei or imprisonment from 1 to 5 years, in both cases with deprivation of the right to hold certain positions or to exercise a certain activity for up to three years.