The Provincial Court of León has sentenced a man to seven years in prison who swindled nearly 300,000 euros from an elderly woman with a mental disorder whom he made believe that the money was deposited in the “Banco del Cielo” in order to build a building there. a home with her mother and husband, already deceased.
As reported this Thursday by legal sources, the victim suffers from an alteration in the content of thought, in the form of delusional mystical-religious and megalomaniacal ideation, which altered, in its entirety, her capacity for judgment and decision, as it placed her outside of reality.
This situation and delusional ideas, at least since 2013, became more present, completely altering his cognitive and volitional capacities.
The magistrates of the Third Section consider it proven that the accused, aware of the woman’s mental state – of her exaggerated religious ideas that made her even consider herself “saint” – plotted the possibility of getting hold of all the savings she had deposited in different entities. banking.
To this end, he made the old woman believe, with telephone calls from a hidden number, that “Our Lord Jesus Christ” or the “Virgin Mary” were calling her to ask her to withdraw different amounts of money from her accounts and give them to him to deposit them in the “Bank of Heaven” or to take them to the store that the accused ran.
Once there, the magistrates say in their resolution, “in a massage room on the premises, he told her to put the money in a drawer from where it went to the ‘Banco del Cielo’, causing her to believe that there he would rent her money.” more and she could build a house in heaven, with her mother and husband, making the accused believe that he also deposited money in said heavenly bank.”
The sentence explains that to give greater credibility to the “apparitions”, the accused staged conversations in his store or on the telephone, changing or altering his voice and making the old woman believe that he was talking to his deceased mother, God or the Virgin Mary.
He also pressured her by saying that he was going to kill her children or make the money deposited in heaven disappear if she told those that he was giving her money.
The convicted man has added almost 287,000 euros to his assets from the elderly woman he was deceiving for six years.
The victim has lost all his savings, leaving only the monthly payments of his small pension, which the accused could not get hold of when he was discovered and denounced by the victim’s children.
“Not only has she lost all her savings but she was left in debt with the bank from which she requested a personal loan and now she faces her future not with what she had but with what she has left, only her pension accrued month by month, after the predatory action of the accused who, without a doubt, knew that with his successive requests, he would end up defrauding the old woman’s entire assets,” the sentence underlines.
The woman, in her statement at the trial, explained that she came to ask him to buy bread because she no longer had money and he replied that he could not give her anything because he had had some unforeseen expenses due to his mother’s supposed illness.
