The call is completely unexpected. “Hello mom. I was in a terrible car accident,” a woman sobbed. ‘I’m with the police. I have been arrested. I ran over a woman.” First, the shock runs deep and is the start of a perfidious scam that has become increasingly common in recent years.

Because of the so-called shock calls, two men have to respond this week in different proceedings before the district court in Munich. It is said that, as part of organized gangs, they defrauded mainly older victims for a total of almost 300,000 euros. At the start of the first trial on Monday, the defendant confessed to taking cash and jewelry from victims as an alleged collector. The second trial begins Friday.

It is not uncommon for all savings to be lost.

It is possible that the calls from the groups began as described at the beginning: in a call recorded by the Bavarian police. The further development of the scam is almost always the same: after the alleged relative, a presumed police officer or the prosecutor takes over the conversation, talks to the person called, threatens to put the relative in pretrial detention due to an accident that he himself caused. Unless there is a deposit of several tens of thousands of euros to be delivered to a courier, the collector. The calls often go on for hours and end with the loss of all savings.

The crucial element of phone calls: the faked extreme emergency. “The emotional distress felt by victims is really intense,” says Juliane Lomb, deputy director of the white-collar crime department at the Federal Criminal Police Office. The called person gets an almost perfect show, with much more pressure than with the so-called grandson trick, which has been practiced for a long time. “If the alleged family member speaks on the phone in a tearful voice, the likelihood that the victim will believe the story is much higher.”

Individual regions affected in waves

According to the police, the perpetrators act mainly from abroad. The Federal Criminal Police Office has identified Poland, the Czech Republic and Great Britain as focal points. Only the collection of money and property takes place there, which are then quickly transported across the border. The victims are found throughout Germany and also in neighboring countries. The individual zones into which a collector’s work can be grouped are affected in waves.

In December 2022, a band made four calls to Stuttgart and Innsbruck, Austria, and was successful twice. According to the prosecution, it was picked up by the 21-year-old who has been in court since Monday. According to the prosecution, the group, whose 43-year-old member is due to respond on Friday, worked from the Saarland to Munich. The scam worked on two out of seven calls.

Criminals often got the phone numbers from the phone book, but lists with the contact details of potential victims also circulated on the dark web, says Juliane Lomb of the Federal Criminal Police Office. If you get a call from the police asking for cash, you should hang up and call 911. However, the investigator assumes that many cases are not even known to the police. Victims often do not report the scam: they feel ashamed that they fell for it.