Fake accountant cruelly tricks Greek pensioner out of €400,000 saying “a satellite is watching”

An elderly woman did exactly as she was told: she packed €400,000 in cash and jewellery into a bag and left it outside her front door. The man who came to take it was not, however, as she believed, calling on behalf of the tax office.

The case happened in early August in a village near Livadeia, in the Viotia region of central Greece. Police say an accomplice phoned the woman claiming to be an accountant, warning her that a satellite needed to record and catalogue her cash and jewellery for tax purposes, and that she would face serious penalties if she refused to comply.

Suspect filmed collecting the bag before vanishing towards Athens

A 45-year-old man arrived at her home minutes later to collect the bag, according to Greek police in Livadeia. Video and photographic evidence gathered near the property has since shown him carrying it to a car and driving off toward the western suburbs of Athens.

Officers searched his home but didn’t find him, and he remains wanted. Investigators are now trying to identify other members of the network they believe helped plan and carry out the fraud, which police describe as one of several coordinated roles: someone to make the call, someone to build the victim’s trust, and someone to collect the money.

Greece calls the wave of scams an ‘epidemic’

The case is one of several to hit elderly people in Greece in recent weeks. In one, a woman in Aigialeia lost €76,500 after scammers posing as utility workers persuaded her to leave money at her building entrance. Police have also dismantled a gang accused of making €1.6 million in just three months by cold-calling numbers pulled from old phone directories.

Citizen Protection Minister Michalis Chrysochoidis has described the situation as an epidemic and said the government will amend the Criminal Code to make organised telephone fraud a felony, with tougher penalties when elderly victims are deliberately targeted. A specialised police unit is also being set up within the Directorate for Combating Organised Crime to dismantle the networks behind the calls, which frequently impersonate banks and utility companies.

Officers have also flagged a newer complication: emerging cases in which callers use AI-generated voice cloning to imitate a relative in distress, making the standard advice to listen for something that doesn’t sound quite right harder to rely on than it used to be. 

The same trick is already draining bank accounts in the UK and Spain

The method will be familiar to anyone who follows courier fraud cases in the UK, where fraudsters posing as police officers or bank staff talk elderly victims into withdrawing cash or buying gold and jewellery, then send a courier to collect it. City of London Police say more than £21 million (€24 million) was lost to courier fraud in the UK in the last financial year, with people in their 80s among those most likely to be targeted.

Similar patterns have turned up in Spain too. Guardia Civil have investigated an elderly-targeted cashpoint fraud ring in Alicante province, and a separate gang accused of isolating and exploiting an elderly man in the Basque Country before draining his accounts.

What a genuine official will never ask you to do

Officers investigating the Greek case have stressed that no genuine employee of a bank, public service or accountancy firm will ever ask someone to hand over cash, jewellery or one-time verification codes over the phone. Anyone contacted this way is advised to hang up and call the organisation directly using a number they already have, rather than one given by the caller.

The advice applies just as well to a similar call about a suspicious WhatsApp message: verify independently before acting, never on the caller’s own terms.