For months now, Diego Romero, a resident of Ibiza, has been unable to sleep. It all started in 2018, when he met the person who would end up swindling him out of 70,000 euros, his life savings. He frequented the terrace of his workplace, the restaurant La Torreta, in Dalt Vila, always between phone calls and business trips. He repeatedly told him that she was a high-ranking member of one of the island’s best-known hotel groups. “He was just another client, but little by little we got to know each other,” says Romero. After three years, one day they began to chat. “He told me his problems and I told him mine. In 2019 I left the relationship with my partner, I had a pretty bad time,” explains the victim. He confessed to him that he was going through a complicated period and that he was going to sell his ex-partner his share of the house they bought together.
“He was constantly pretending that he was handling money”
A few months later, in December last year, the alleged scammer, aged 40 and from Sitges, moved to the island. “As he had just arrived, I introduced him to my friends and brought him into my circle,” explains the victim. After countless walks, lunches, dinners, coffees and group meetings, the suspect gradually gained his trust. “He’s the typical charming guy who suggests plans, outings…”, he explains. In addition to being a manager, he told them that he was a lawyer and had been a court clerk. “He constantly made it look like he was handling money,” he says. “He paid for rounds, he sent us photos on the plane when he went on a business trip, of the meetings he had…. Also with the uniform and the accreditation of the hotel where he supposedly worked,” recalls the victim, who saw how on up to three occasions this man “signed safe-conducts as a director” of the hotel chain to bring “supposed workers to the island in the middle of the pandemic”.
The purchase of the house
The day he received the money for the sale of the house, 75,000 euros, Romero received a message from him. “He knew I was having a hard time, so he made it look like he cared about me,” he explains. After a while he told him that, because of his work, he had contacts in the Ibiza Courts, so he “found out about repossessed flats” ready for sale. “He told me that they would pass him information about these flats before they were repossessed. If you contacted the bank and paid the debt, you could get the apartment at a very good price”.
“Every two or three days he would give me information about how everything was going, he asked me for documents to continue the process, he sent me photos of the flat, the location, everything. I couldn’t imagine that it was all a lie”
Feeling somewhat down and living at his sister’s house after the separation, the idea of a home of his own filled him with hope. And he accepted. After a few days, his supposed friend offered him two possible flats. One of them, for 150,000 euros, one hundred square metres and located on Avenida de España in Ibiza. “I said yes and we started to organize everything,” he explains. In the meantime, Romero recalls how this man helped him with a legal problem he had with the landlady of the house where his sister lived. “He was gaining my trust”, he regrets.
After Romero looked at different bank options for the mortgage, the alleged fraudster convinced him to apply for it through him at Banco Santander (“an entity with which he had been working for years in the purchase and sale of foreign currency”, he said) so that they would offer him a lower interest rate. So he asked him to deposit the money for the flat in an account in his name: 70,000 euros.
“Every two or three days he gave me information about how everything was going, he asked me for documents to continue the process, he sent me photos of the flat, the location, everything. I couldn’t imagine that everything was a lie”, explains Romero, who even bought some furniture for his new home. In two transfers, the money was in his account and the scam, done.
After months of waiting and countless messages with excuses to justify the delay in the delivery of the apartment, one of his friends became suspicious. “I hadn’t trusted him for a long time and I started to look for information”, explains the friend.
The first contact, a worker of the hotel chain where the scammer supposedly worked, confirmed the worst. “This guy doesn’t work here and has never worked here,” he told him. They asked for the Civil Registry and the flat he was supposedly going to buy was not foreclosed, it had an owner. There was no longer any doubt. However, the fear of losing all his savings prevented him from acting. In May, after five months of evasions and lies, the group of friends met and Romero told them what had happened. But he was not the only one. Two more friends had also been swindled.
For the full article, please visit Diario de Ibiza website here.
