Summer is the time of year that concentrates the greatest number of road trips. Hundreds of thousands of people take advantage of the holidays and the good weather to leave their places of residence and move to other destinations. Unfortunately, it also increases the risk of encountering criminals on the lookout for clueless and unsuspecting drivers, trying to take advantage of them with all kinds of strategies to trick and rob them.
One of the recurring scams criminals use to rob drivers is the rearview mirror scam. It is a ruse that the Mossos d’Esquadra reported for the first time in 2017 and that over the years has been repeated cyclically on Catalan roads. It is not ruled out that this summer it will reappear again. For this reason, the police force has published a series of tips on social networks so that the victims of this scam do not fall into the trap.
The scam is carried out by a person who drives his vehicle and when he chooses his victim, he pretends to have a collision with his car. The damages generally affect the rear-view mirrors of the scammer’s vehicle, which offers its victim the possibility of paying the cost of the repair to avoid possible penalties from the insurance company, in case they decide to file an accident report.
In this ruse, the fraudster, who is usually accompanied by one or more accomplices, tries to make the victim nervous so that they assume the cost of repairing the rear-view mirror. Often, the amount demanded by the scammer is inflated in comparison to the actual damages, allowing them to gain undue financial advantage at the expense of the victim’s ingenuity.
“No way!”, warn the Mossos on their official Twitter profile, who advise drivers who are victims of a scam of this type to process the accident report with their insurance company. “If you have any problem -adds the police force- contact 112”, which is the emergency telephone number.
Unfortunately, some drivers fall into the trap and pay the amount of money requested by criminals to avoid paperwork with the insurance company. In the worst case, when the victim does not have enough cash, the criminals offer to accompany her to an ATM. But as the Mossos warn in the tweet, it is another strategy used by criminals to see the PIN and steal the card.
The Mossos warn that the victims chosen by scammers are usually elderly people as they are more vulnerable when it comes to stunning them. In a video posted on YouTube, a police officer explains the modus operandi used by criminals, who are generally from the south of France and drive a vehicle with a foreign license plate.
The mosso reports that once the criminals have obtained the documentation of the victim’s vehicle, they pretend to make a call to the insurer to report the accident. However, they contact an accomplice posing as a company employee and put the victim on the phone. He explains that procedures between vehicles from different countries are slow and involve a high financial cost.
So, to expedite the procedures, he recommends paying the policy excess in cash, between 1,200 and 1,500 euros, to cover the damage to the rear-view mirror. According to the scammer, the insurance will later pay the advanced figure, something that will never happen.
