Five people, four men and one woman, were indicted on Friday November 22 for organized gang fraud, according to a source close to the case. Four suspects are placed in pre-trial detention and one under judicial supervision. Justice will rule on the fate of two other people later.
All seven, aged 30 to 53, are suspected of being high-flying crooks who used counterfeit banknotes to buy luxury Rolex watches, the national gendarmerie told franceinfo. Among the seven suspects, there are five men and two women. Five are of French nationality and two are Serbian.
The investigation began at the end of 2023, when a seller told the police that he had been defrauded by two men. He had instructed his son to sell a collectible Rolex to buyers in a hotel near Roissy-Charles-de-Gaulle airport. The transaction takes place in a private room rented for this purpose. A pair of buyers show up and hand over 120,000 euros in cash.
But everything does not go as planned, as Colonel Denis Hebinger, who heads the Versailles research section, explains: “The seller is given confidence. He is faced with people who present themselves well, who have rented a private room in a hotel. There is a wad of notes passing through a counter – always the same wad – while a bag is filled with counterfeit notes A bag which is given to him at the end of the sale but it is too late at that time for him to realize that it is full of counterfeits..
Responsible for the investigation, the Versailles Research Section (SR) identifies a team of criminals from the Balkans. The specificity of the latter is to mobilize “talents” of various offenders across Europe, as Denis Hebinger explains: “We have a team which is formed with each person having their 'qualities' or 'talents'. There is the team which makes contact, which presents well, the team which speaks on the telephone and which will locate the watches for international sales and the team which will be responsible for selling the merchandise, which will be a different team and which will present just as well”.
In addition to the duo of fake buyers who handle the tickets in Roissy-Charles-de-Gaulle, the gendarmes also identified touts specializing in the detection of luxury watches offered for sale, a principal, a counterfeiter supplier of counterfeit notes installed in Marseille, and resellers. For example, the Roissy watch was offered for sale in Italy.
Tuesday, November 19, the authorities decided to start arrests. The operation is coordinated by the Research Section (SR) of Versailles. It makes arrests in Bouches-du-Rhône, Seine-Saint-Denis, Pas-de-Calais and the Nord, but also in Amsterdam (Netherlands) with the support of Dutch police officers, the Interministerial Research Group (GIR) of Pontoise, the SR of Marseille, the Central Office for the Fight against Traveling Delinquency (OCLDI) and the gendarmerie groups of the Val-d'Oise, Pas-de-Calais and the North.
Fourteen addresses were searched. The authorities seized six Rolex watches, four German sedans, bottles of prestigious wines, a precious stone estimated at 400,000 euros and collectible Pokémon cards, which can be worth several tens of thousands of euros, but also several tens of thousands of euros in cash and in bank accounts, cryptocurrency wallets to be evaluated, or even counterfeit notes.
