A Lebanese man was sentenced to six years in prison and a fine of 50,000 euros on Wednesday in Marseille for having defrauded a couple of entrepreneurs and extorted 90,000 euros from an Armenian trader. Faced in April 2021 with a tax audit of their construction companies, a couple from Marseille met a certain Dany. Showing a card from the General Directorate of External Security (DGSE), Dany Hadid, 49, promises them an intervention in exchange for collaboration with the French state.
Fake refund coupons from the Department of Defense
The couple is asked to finance special agent operations in Lebanon. The trap closes. While the tax authorities will set the adjustment at 68,000 euros, the couple will pay more than 853,000 euros to Dany in a year and a half in the form of checks and transfers to relatives of the defendant in Lebanon, but also gifts and jewelry to his wife. Sometimes accompanied by a fake customs commander, the scammer gives them fake reimbursement coupons from the Ministry of Defense. The two spouses, who believe they have sent a birthday gift to Bernard Emié, the boss of the DGSE, are rewarded with a thank you SMS signed “Bernard E”.
The hoax goes so far as to send supposed agents to their homes to detect possible “snitches”. Among themselves, they had to refer to the secret services as “the fiber”. “’The fiber knows everything that’s happening,’ Dany told us,” the husband explained in court. His wife added: “He told us, ‘I can even tell the color of toilet paper’.”
The couple described themselves as isolated, “in a bubble”. “A total influence” which, according to their lawyer Fabrice Giletta, ruined them: “They paid him all the sums in their accounts and those of their companies, all of their life insurance and that of their children”. The deception was revealed when the spouses, beginning to doubt, went, in June 2022, to the headquarters of the DGSE. A second victim, an Armenian trader whose son had been sentenced to eighteen years in prison for the murder of a young person during a brawl, paid nearly 90,000 euros to his Lebanese “friend” to protect himself from possible reprisals.
Already convicted of fraud in 2017
The defendant had falsified the signature of the Minister of Justice in a document reporting a false pardon and a reduced sentence granted to his son: “It was to cheer him up,” Dany Hadid justified. In 2017, he had already been sentenced to five years in prison and an 80,000 euro fine in Versailles for having ruined an Egyptian restaurateur, again using the false status of secret agent, with the complicity of a former musician from the gendarmerie band.
In April, the Paris criminal court sentenced him to seven years in prison for raping a vulnerable person, a sentence he appealed. He had held out the promise of special agent functions to a psychologically fragile young woman. He finally tried to buy his Marseille apartment by providing a false bank document attesting to the transfer of funds from Lebanon. “But you never stop!” “, told him the president of the court, Pascal Gand.
At the hearing, Dany Hadid, a trained hairdresser, presented the victims as “unclear”. According to him, his collaboration with prison intelligence would have enabled the arrest of eighteen Daesh members who were preparing actions in prison. The court also sentenced his ex-Syrian wife, for concealment of numerous jewels and sums of cash, to eighteen months suspended prison sentence and a fine of 10,000 euros.