Kenitra Scam Ring Busted: Gendarmerie Foils ’Sunken Treasure’ Extortion Scheme

On the hunting board of the gang specialized in kidnapping, sequestration and violent extortion, businessmen, merchants, real estate developers and large farmers, indicates the daily Assabah. Through a woman, the criminals contacted the victims to whom they made believe that the sea had rejected a chest full of euros, after the sinking of a boat.

They pretended to be ordinary people who could not go to a bank in the city of Kénitra to convert so many euro bills into dirhams. All they ask, they make their prey believe, is to convert this windfall into dirhams, without drawing the attention of the police and the gendarmerie. And it is this precaution required of their victims that aroused another in one of these merchants, who decided to alert the gendarmerie, reports the same source.

Clever, the gendarmerie elements accompany the merchant to his meeting, passing for people interested in this currency exchange market. Very quickly, the suspect is arrested, at the same time as the intermediary woman, as well as two other members of the criminal gang, who, according to the preliminary investigation, have already made many victims. They are being prosecuted for criminal conspiracy, theft and fraud.

Merchants, businessmen and real estate developers, victims of their disconcerting naivety and their attraction to easy gain, laments the newspaper.