The Frankfurt Regional Court (Landgericht Frankfurt) on Monday sentenced three members of a fraud gang to multi-year prison terms for carrying out so-called shock calls that swindled elderly victims across the Rhine-Main region out of their savings. A 25-year-old woman and a 20-year-old man were each given six years in prison for commercial gang fraud, while a second 20-year-old received four years and six months, in part for aiding and abetting. The verdict is not yet legally binding.
The presiding judge described the offences as despicable and particularly reprehensible. He said the defendants had deliberately picked out older and especially vulnerable people in the Rhine-Main area and had used invented emergencies to put them into a state of shock.
Collectors for an international network
The court found that those convicted belonged to an internationally operating fraud group. Their main task was to collect cash and valuables from victims after they had already been talked into handing over their assets during the shock calls.
In this type of scam, callers typically pose as police officers or claim that a relative has been in a serious accident, pressuring the victim into urgently handing over money or valuables to a courier sent to collect them.
Arrest in a Frankfurt residential area
The now 25-year-old woman was arrested on 10 November 2025. An alert policewoman had noticed her and kept her under observation. That same day, in a Frankfurt residential area, the defendant collected the loot from a crying 88-year-old woman who had just been the victim of a shock call. She was arrested immediately afterwards.
The two men were arrested shortly after in a hotel in Frankfurt city centre.
Collector's coins worth 175,000 euros
Among other things, the men are accused of collecting collector's coins worth around 175,000 euros from an 86-year-old man in Offenbach in August 2025.
The fraudsters had told the pensioner over the phone that his daughter had caused a traffic accident in Spain in which a pregnant woman had died. Testifying as a witness, the Offenbach man said the call from a fake police officer had knocked him over, that his hair had stood up, and that it had switched off his mind.
A lie exposed on the phone
The pensioner did not doubt the story for a second, not least because his daughter really was in Spain at the time. To pay a supposedly necessary bail and avert a prison sentence for his daughter, he ultimately handed over his valuable coin collection.
The fraudsters wanted more and kept pressuring the man and his wife by phone. But then one of them slipped up, mentioning a prison in Italy, even though according to their own story it should have been Spain.
The couple then realised they had been defrauded and went to the real police the following morning. The man told the court he was very angry, mostly at his own stupidity, but added that the most important thing was that it had all been a lie and that his daughter was fine.
