"Good morning, I'm a Carabinieri marshal, your son had an accident, he hit two people on the crosswalk and they're in the hospital. To release him you have to pay. Do you have any money at home?"
A ninety-year-old woman answers, reached in her home in Florence, who in a fraction of a second screams, despairs, cries and answers: "Yes of course, come immediately". But she was only pretending. A little less than two years ago she had received the same phone call: that time too she understood that something was wrong. She called the police and had a man arrested outside her home who had arrived by train from Naples with 1,300 euros in his pocket and jewelry worth at least 15 thousand euros .
The old woman immediately recognized the style of the scam but decided to have some fun : "This time," Pina told Corriere Fiorentino, "I started acting, I feigned desperation. They even put me on the phone with a person who pretended to be my son and begged me to hand over everything I had because otherwise they wouldn't release him." With a burst of imagination, she invented three gold necklaces, two bracelets, a Rolex, a solitaire . "Perfect, that's enough. Now lawyer Francesco Russo will come and get the jewelry, put everything in a bag and take it downstairs."
At that point Pina pretended to be sick and while the criminal was waiting on the phone, she called the same policeman who arrested the other scammer two years ago. Then she prepared a bag full of papers that she delivered to the fake lawyer in the entrance hall of the building . And she looked out onto the balcony to enjoy the arrest scene.
The first scammer, not happy, also called her back : "Are you happy with what you did?" "I'm not happy at all, these things should not happen," she replied coldly.
"Because too many of my elderly "colleagues" are being defrauded," Pina says today. "I was saved by reading the newspapers. I've heard of people who have gone crazy after losing the memories of a lifetime because of unscrupulous people. We need to tell these stories, because if even one person is saved, it's already a victory."
