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Italy’s business elite was built up by a fraud that imitated an artificial secret service Guido Crosetto to ask Tycons to turn millions to Übersee bank accounts to pay ransom to free Italian journalists who were kidnapped after overseas.
The fraud aimed at some of the most powerful business barons in Italy, including Pirelli chairman Marco Tronchetti Provera, fashion designer Giorgio Armani, Prada co-founder Patrizio Bertelli, Tod’s owner Diego Della Valle, the former Inter-Mailand owner Massimo Moratti and Members of Billionaire Beretta and Mensarini And men and mensarini and mensarini and mensarini and mensarini and mensarini families, a person with knowledge of the investigation.
While many were immediately suspicious, at least one was persuaded to transfer EUR 1 million to the overseas bank accounts after he was wrongly insured that the bank will later be reimbursed for the payment. So far, three Milan Business employees have submitted formal complaints to the city’s public prosecutor, including one who fell victim to fraud.
The authorities familiar with the case say that the fraud included several calls from people with crosetto’s employees and the obvious use of AI to convince crosetto’s voice. The aim was told that the government of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni needed her help to save Italian journalists in the Middle East.
“The minister’s voice was reproduced,” said a Department of Department. “It was asked for money to pay ransom for Italian journalists who were kidnapped in the world. The fake crosetto said: “I can’t pay with the Ministry’s money, but you will get the money back from Italy.” It was a joke. It was wrong. “
The investigators said the calls seemed to come from telephone numbers that belonged to the staff of the Minister of Defense – of which they believed they had been cloned.
Just a few weeks after the negotiation of Meloni’s government, the fraudsters drew a top-class hostage exchange, in which a young Italian journalist Cecilia Sala, Cecilia Sala freed From Tehran’s notorious Evin prison in exchange against Rome, who returned an Iranian engineer in the USA for a program US drone technology To the revolutionary guards of Iran.
Crosetto was the alarm of a “serious fraud” for the first time last week in a social media contribution and said that he wanted to sharpen public awareness so that “nobody exists the risk of falling”.
The minister said was crosetto himself.
Crosetto said he later received calls from several other top entrepreneurs who had been contacted by people who are supposed to be members of his employees who try to organize the rescue of Italian journalists in the Middle East.
Italy warned the bank on Friday that fraudsters did not use their names and logo properly to promise that the central bank would reimburse money that wealthy entrepreneurs invested as contributions to the fake rescue system.
“Banca d’Italia does not refer to these inquiries in any way,” says the explanation, since it warned people not to respond to the relevant authorities and report them to the relevant authorities.
Italy’s business elite is not the first to be credited by fraud, the wealthy persons who want to open discrete favors for a government who wants to save the hostages.
A decade ago in France, more than 150 company bosses, heads of state, ambassador and religious guide were contacted in one Kühner fraud When a man who claimed to be the French Defense Minister Jean-Yves, Le Drian, Le Drian asked for millions of euros for strictly secret government operations, including the free godfather in Syria as hostage.
Although most of them felt something slate, the fraudsters succeeded in collecting $ 85 million, including almost 20 million USD from the late AGA Khan, head of Ismaili Muslims in the world. The ring manager Gilbert Chikli, a French Israeli, was convicted of several fraud counts in 2020 and sentenced to 11 years in prison.
Additional reporting from Giuliana Ricozzi
