She received a strange text message from a scammer. She was detained. She spent almost a year in custody

the case of Mrs. Magdalena, who was framed by fraudsters impersonating the police. The criminals stole several dozen thousand zlotys from the senior citizen and disappeared with the money. An innocent woman spent almost a year in custody because she received a text message from one of them.

They deceived a senior citizen and framed another woman. It started with a phone call and a text message with a code

The whole case started in Wrocław with a fraud, the victim of which was an elderly resident of the city. The senior received a call from fraudsters who pretended to be police officers. They convinced the woman that her money was at risk and persuaded her to take a loan from the bank. She threw the borrowed money in cash over the balcony to the criminals, and sent all the savings (PLN 10,000) by postal order using the details provided by the false officers.

Then Mrs. Magdalena received a text message informing her that she had to collect money from a quick postal order. The surprised woman went to the post office to explain the matter. There she found out it was a mistake. – I showed the lady my phone at the window and she asked me for my ID. She said it was a transfer to some gentleman from Wrocław. I asked where the mistake came from and whether I should go to the police and report it. I was told no, that someone had probably made a mistake with one digit and the text message had reached me. She said to ignore it and I ignored it – admits the woman, quoted by TVN.

This turned out to be a mistake. One day at 6 a.m. the police entered Mrs. Magdalena’s apartment. – It was just a second, I heard someone breaking into the house. A policeman and a policewoman entered the bedroom and asked: “Where’s the phone?” They took it and started browsing through it and reading text messages. I heard they had this message. Immediately, the police threatened me that I would go to prison for many years, says the woman in the program. She was arrested on suspicion of participating in an organized criminal group and placed in pre-trial detention. She found out that the evidence in her case was the text message she received.

Fake policeman and fellow hacker. This was not a random offering

After some time, the police arrested two other people – Arkadiusz S. and Wojciech A. – men who, on the day of defrauding the senior woman, were drinking alcohol in front of the store. It turned out that an unknown man approached them and offered them quick and easy money. They agreed to lend their data as the so-called poles for – as stated in the program – PLN 200 or 300. The men collected the money order using their names and the code from the text message sent to Mrs. Magdalena. Where did they get it? This was not clear for a long time.

Only after some time did it turn out that Mrs. Magdalena was not a random “scapegoat”. The text message didn’t come to her by mistake either. In the meantime, there was testimony from a repentant member of the group – a hacker who admitted to framing the woman. As he said, a friend asked him about it. The hacker precisely selected his victim and broke into his phone, installing the Anubis Trojan. This is how he managed to read the text message and pass it on to a friend, who then passed its contents to the people he employed.

The hacker admitted that he framed several other people in a similar way. However, the material does not state whether he was convicted. The court sentenced Arkadiusz S. and Wojciech A. to less than three years in prison. Both of them could not indicate who they gave the money to. Mrs. Magdalena was ultimately acquitted by two courts. However, while waiting for the verdict, she spent exactly 293 days in custody, which – as explained in the program – was an extremely traumatic experience for her. The fake policeman, other members of the group and the money extorted from the senior woman were never found.