Two things dominate Marlene Bayer’s living room: orchids. And angels. The windowsill is lined with pink flowers in white pots, and a white angel sits on the heavy wooden chest of drawers; There are four more hanging on the wall that belonged to a friend who has since died. No, says Bayer, they are not their guardian angels. But yes, she has had many guardian angels in her life.
Marlene Bayer is a remarkable person. Not only because the heart of the now 82-year-old woman from Maidbronn in Lower Franconia has already stopped three times and is now beating again as if nothing had ever happened. When it broke out, she saw ten men with wings in front of a wall, says Bayer. A near-death experience. Your guardian angels. It is at least as remarkable that Marlene Bayer convicts a number of tricksters. You could say: Today she is a guardian angel herself. The guardian angel of seniors.
The story began on a day in February 2019. Shortly before, the former saleswoman had once again heard on the radio how crooks tricked older people out of their savings with shock calls and the grandchild trick. Then she said to her brother: “If they call me, I’ll put them in.” She should be right.
Bayer has recently told her story more often; in September, Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann (CSU) awarded her a medal for civil courage in Munich. Afterwards, there was great media interest in the detective in the striped shirt, which she wears alongside a self-confident short hairstyle and red-painted toenails.
The words fumble out of her; Only sometimes she loses the thread and seems to want to find it again with her searching gaze somewhere in the living room among the orchids and angels. “I don’t remember all the details,” she says. And then remembers quite a few details.
And so back to February 2019. The supposed police called Bayer: six Romanians had their house in their sights for a break-in. To be on the safe side, she should hand over jewelry and all her cash to the officers. Bayer immediately saw through the fraudsters – and agreed to give them 25,000 euros that had allegedly been deposited in their house. When a neat young woman finally showed up for the agreed handover, she was arrested. In the meantime, Bayer had called the real police from her cell phone under the pretext of making a coffee.
A court sentenced the arrested woman, a mother of two, to four and a half years in prison. She was the leader of a gang, it emerged in court. The group, like many others, operated a fraudulent call center in Turkey and called senior citizens from there.
Many newspapers have already reported when Marlene Bayer has once again exposed con artists.
(Photo: Max Weinhold)
This is where Marlene Bayer’s story could end – if the phone hadn’t rang again in May 2022. This time her daughter allegedly drove a child to death and committed a hit-and-run. Bayer should bail her out of custody. “Which police officer demands bail over the phone?” she asks indignantly. “No one!”
So she called the real police again and arranged the next handover, this time in a supermarket. Instead of jewelry, she carried a bag with cutlery – it’s heavy and jingles too. Unfortunately, both her brother and sister-in-law along with their daughter came by to shop, and she had to turn them away without explanation. “They thought: What’s happening now? Is she crazy?” In the end everything went well: When the perpetrator entered the store to hand over the money, the police arrested him.
Bayer’s next hussar piece. Of course, not everyone falls for the scammers’ tricks. But very few people turn the tables and let the crooks believe that they really received the money until they are arrested. “You have to be able to act and act really, really stupid,” explains Bayer. Can she. She “mostly played the stupid maid” in the local sports club’s theater. A school for life.
Once when police sirens blared from the receiver and the fraudsters announced that they had just caught a burglar, but that another was on the run and probably on his way to her, she lamented full of self-pity: “But what should I do then? I am all alone.” But she didn’t believe a word of their “stupid babble”.
The problem: Many older people do exactly that. The Bavarian State Criminal Police Office (BLKA) records various methods in its statistics under the keyword call center crimes, including call center fraud, in which, as with Bayer, false police calls are made. Or the grandchild trick, which in the broadest sense involves relatives who are said to have caused an accident, such as at Bayer.
With the latter type of shock calls, the BLKA recorded “a significant increase in the number of cases and the amount of damage” last year. The police in Bavaria counted around 11,500 cases, and the perpetrators were successful 650 times, gaining loot worth almost 14 million euros. The police suspect that there is a high number of unreported cases, particularly when it comes to attempted crimes. In the case of call center fraud – i.e. the fake police method – the value of the loot was even higher at around 15 million euros for around 18,500 attempted and 1,500 completed acts. After all, this form of fraud is “severely declining”.
Marlene Bayer has her arms crossed in front of her striped shirt; All that’s left is for her to stomp her feet on the ground, she’s so outraged by the brazen fraudsters. “People have earned their money hard and saved it from their mouths so that they can still have something when they get older, and then they are ripped off like that,” she complains. And in the next breath she reprimands her peers. “People finally have to wake up. I almost can’t understand why so many people still fall for it.” You always hear about it on the radio and read about such cases in the newspaper.
Gangs create lists of old phone numbers and sell them to scammers
As well as her third one. Just six months after the second case, fraudsters called again and told her on the phone that this time it was her son who had run over a child. He has lived in the Caribbean for a long time, but the callers didn’t know that. A cheap trick. So when Bayer alerted the real officials again in November 2022, she sent one thing straight away: “Please don’t think that I have dementia. It’s really true.” With the help of the police, another woman was arrested. However, she got away without punishment because her husband claimed to have forced her to commit the crime. The investigators were unable to prove that he had committed any further crimes and he received a suspended sentence.
But why is Bayer called so often? After all, her first name Marlene is not an old-fashioned one that fits into the classic prey scheme. The police explained it to her like this: Specialized gangs create lists of old phone numbers and sell them to the fraudsters. Bayer and their old connection are also on such a list.
And so it took less than two months until the next call. A masked 23-year-old came to the handover in January 2022. “That was strange,” she says. But she was never afraid. What concerned them much more was that this man also only received a suspended sentence after his arrest. “Then I said: I won’t do it anymore!” But this time she wasn’t right.
It was just a few weeks ago that it happened again. The day before she had been in court about another case, then the phone rang: her daughter had caused an accident, the usual ploy, everything as usual. Marlene Bayer routinely let the alleged inspector Bach run into the arms of the real inspectors. “I just can’t help it,” she says.
What happens when the next call comes? “Then I’ll do it again,” she assures. If no one tries anymore, everything would be fine. The guardian angel would then go into his deserved retirement.