He bet on the wrong horse. A resident of the Hauts-de-France region managed to extract the tidy sum of nearly 300,000 euros from the PMU without ever having bet on a horse race. From a very simple scheme he made a real business and it was this delusion of grandeur which inevitably caused him to fall into the hands of the police.
According to RMC, which reveals the affair, the accused used and abused a bonus offered by the PMU to each person who opened a player account on its website. To receive this bonus several times, the man had simply created multiple player accounts, sometimes using invented identities, sometimes usurped identities, sometimes stolen identities purchased on the web.
Three fatal mistakes
In just one year, between July 2022 and July 2023, this man had opened 974 false player accounts with the PMU, representing damage estimated by the company at 272,000 euros. In principle, for a seasoned crook, having found this loophole and exploiting it might seem clever. Except he wasn’t, seasoned, even if it still took the police a year to trace him. His mistake? Link all your fake accounts to the same player wallet and make transfers to the same bank accounts.
So on Monday, investigators arrived at the home of this 42-year-old man and took him into custody. His last blunder was to hide a USB key in his car containing all the false identities used to defraud the PMU. Indicted for money laundering and fraud according to RMC, he was placed under judicial supervision while awaiting his trial.