In this case, five people aged 30 to 53 were indicted in Pontoise. Four German sedans and a precious stone estimated at 400,000 euros were notably seized by the gendarmes.
Five individuals were indicted for organized gang fraud in Pontoise (Val-d'Oise), on November 19, we learned Le Figaro with the national gendarmerie. In this case, four of them were placed in pre-trial detention and one under judicial supervision. The thugs, from the Balkans and aged between 30 and 53, are notably suspected of being linked to a luxury watch fraud network.
Initially, seven people – five men and two women – were taken into custody. The two women were released. In mid-November, during an operation carried out by the gendarmes in several departments of France and in Amsterdam, 14 addresses were searched. The operations made it possible to seize six Rolexes, four German sedans, several tens of thousands of euros in cash and bank accounts, cryptocurrency wallets, counterfeit banknotes, bottles of champagne and prestigious wines, a precious stone estimated at 400,000 euros and collectible Pokémon cards, details the gendarmerie.
Fake notes
To trace the organized network, the gendarmes investigated a dubious transaction, dating from the end of 2023. A seller of Vietnamese nationality sent his son living in Germany to sell a collectible Rolex to buyers in a hotel near the Roissy Charles de Gaulle airport, in Paris. To “instill confidence in the seller,” a pair of buyers rent a private room. They hand over the sum of 120,000 euros in cash.
After the meeting, the seller realizes the deception: the bag containing the bank notes contains only fakes, hidden by an illusion effect. The crooks presented a wad of real notes in front of the seller while the bag containing the rest of the amount was filled with fakes, the military said. Thanks to careful cross-checking, the gendarmes of the Versailles Research Section managed to reconstruct the entire cheating.
Mobilizing “talents”
This affair allows them to get their hands on a network made up of various delinquents across Europe. The duo of fake buyers, touts specialized in detecting luxury watches offered for sale, a principal, a counterfeiter supplier of counterfeit notes, and resellers were thus found. The investigators then discovered that Roissy's watch was offered for sale in Italy and that the two thugs lived in the Netherlands.
On November 19, the operation was then launched in Bouches-du-Rhône, Seine-Saint-Denis, Pas-de-Calais, the North and Amsterdam, “with the support of Dutch police officers, the Interministerial Research Group of Pontoise, the SR of Marseille, the Central Office for the Fight against Traveling Delinquency” and gendarmerie groups from Val d'Oise in particular. A dragnet for the military, the seven individuals were arrested.
