Criminal ring detained for swindles in Moldova

Chisinau, 19 November /MOLDPRES/ - A criminal ring has been detained by law enforcers, after it had carried out swindles worth up to one million lei at a petroleum company during three months. 

Eleven persons were involved in the fraudulent scheme, and the latter was managed by two men and a woman, who acted as operators of the oil products company.  

The spokesman for the Chisinau police, Adrian Jovmir, told a today news conference that the "concerned persons were fictitiously including sums of money on oil supply cards, without compulsorily recording this process in a special programme. Thus, they were avoiding to transfer the money to the enterprise and were not issuing bills of sale. Subsequently, the other accomplices had the role to withdraw the money fictitiously deposited on cards from other fuel supply stations against the demanded quantities of oil, without supplying the vehicles by which they were moving."

Under the processed information, the suspects were able to withdraw up to 20,000 lei from cards during one day alone.

Jovmir also said that "within searches, policemen discovered and raised ten cards from which about one million lei would have been withdrawn illegally, cell phones by which the perpetrators were coordinating their actions, as well as electronic bearers of information on the illegally withdrawn sums of money."

All the suspects were detained for 72 hours and are prosecuted for swindles in especially big amount. They run the risk of being sentenced to 8-15 years of imprisonment.        

(Reporter A. Plitoc, editor M. Jantovan)