A vast scam with international ramifications, like a “presidential scam”, where this time the crooks posed as suppliers of the targeted companies, is judged from Monday to Friday at the Marseille Criminal Court, involving fifteen defendants.
The charges range from organized gang fraud to money laundering and seventeen entities (companies or associations) have joined as civil parties for these facts which mainly date back to 2015-2016.
A third of the defendants are suspected of having played a leading role in the operation consisting of unduly being paid real invoices by posing as a supplier. The fraudulent scheme involved a telephone call center based in Israel and fictitious companies, also based abroad, notably in Spain, responsible for collecting the embezzled funds. Four of the main protagonists in this case have been the subject of an arrest warrant since 2022, their last known address being an address in Israel.
Fake identity and real invoices
As in the “president scam”, where a crook usurps the identity of a company manager to convince an employee to make a transfer, the scam involved identity theft, that of suppliers. The so-called suppliers informed their “customers” of a change of bank address and collected the payment of real invoices on these false accounts.
If some companies did not let themselves be caught, others were trapped by the very sophisticated operating methods of the scammers who had perfect knowledge of the targeted companies (customer-supplier relationships, amount of invoices to be paid, etc.).
Three of the defendants subject to an arrest warrant – Alain Lasserie, Wilfried El Baze and Stéphane Benhamou – were the kingpins of the call center in Israel, according to a Marseille co-defendant, Emmanuel Fitoussi, referred to the criminal court for fraud and attempted fraud by an organized gang.
“Patrick Montiel”
The latter, under judicial supervision since 2020, admitted to having worked in this center under a pseudonym which appears in numerous files, “Patrick Montiel”, but as a simple employee, according to his statements.
His statements, as well as similar investigations carried out in Bordeaux and Nancy, led investigators to suspect Alain Lasserie of having been the brains of the operation and Stéphane Benhamou of having been the operator (computers, false email addresses, false RIB and supporting documents), while Wilfried El Baze was allegedly responsible for recruiting people opening ghost companies abroad, to transfer fraudulently acquired funds to their accounts.
On the docks will also be a series of people, most of them domiciled in Marseille, for their alleged role in the laundering of illicit money passing through their bank accounts.
They are being prosecuted for complicity in fraud committed by an organized gang and/or money laundering.