Montreal man convicted in ‘brazen’ scheme to defraud seniors
Quebec Court Judge Salvatore Mascia read the first few pages of his 136-page judgment, then set it down to look directly at the accused sitting before him.
Mascia was addressing Richard Chandroo, a Montreal man accused of using an elaborate inheritance scam to defraud four seniors of hundreds of thousands of dollars.
“I need to weigh my words,” the judge said, pausing for a moment before straying from his written ruling.
“You showed no remorse. You never relented. You continued squeezing one person after another,” Mascia told Chandroo, saying he acted without shame while defrauding seniors with “brazen audacity.”
As for Chandroo’s defence in court — that he was acting in good faith — Mascia described it as preposterous, ludicrous, contrived and farfetched. It was a “pitiful and desperate” attempt by Chandroo, he said, to wiggle his way out of the “very damning” evidence in the case.
In the end, Mascia found Chandroo, 45, guilty of each of the fraud charges in the case but acquitted him of the one extortion charge he faced. Sentencing arguments will take place in September.
The four victims in the case were all in their late 70s or 80s when Chandroo latched on to them. Prosecutors had argued he took one of the victims, since deceased, for at least $600,000, another for $19,500 and an elderly couple for $91,000.
The scheme Chandroo used resembled a typical inheritance scam but was based on a real will his grandfather had signed years earlier in Trinidad and Tobago.
He would gain the victims’ trust, then ask for money to help liquidate his grandfather’s estate. He told them it was worth millions and promised they would be paid back. But the estate had already been liquidated years before. None of the victims would ever receive any money in return.
In order to keep paying Chandroo, the seniors emptied out their savings accounts, took out second mortgages on their homes or applied for lines of credit.
They were not gullible or naive, Mascia noted, but rather “skilfully manipulated” by Chandroo. He forged multiple documents and impersonated people over the phone so they would believe others were involved in liquidating the estate.
“My father was too proud to even talk to us about it,” the daughter of one victim testified during the trial. “I think he was so brainwashed that he just could not believe this was happening to him.”
Chandroo was not represented by a lawyer in the trial.
Part of his defence was that he sincerely believed he was still owed money from the estate. But Mascia dismissed Chandroo’s version of events as “nothing more than fanciful inventions,” saying he purposely lied and misrepresented facts throughout his testimony.
“Never in my 12 years as a judge or my 24 years as a defence attorney,” Mascia said, “have I heard an individual spin one improbable tale after another” the way Chandroo did.
In a separate case, Chandroo was convicted last year of defrauding a young financial adviser of $43,000 by using the same inheritance scam. He was sentenced to a 15-month prison term, but was released while appealing his conviction.