Phone scam targeted elderly women, court told
Network sought out widows using online death notices, fraudster testifies
A Montreal man who helped defraud elderly women out of thousands of dollars and then decided to become a prosecution witness against his accomplices is expected to be sentenced in the coming weeks for his role in the scam.
Stéphane Elias, 43, a resident of the Rosemont–La Petite-Patrie borough, admitted to Quebec Court Judge Linda Despots on Tuesday that he was looking to make some quick and easy money while he took orders from fraudsters who were constantly calling elderly people while pretending to be their grandchild or nephew in need of emergency cash.
A lawyer who provided Despots with details of the case during a hearing at the Montreal courthouse said fraudsters would pretend to have been in a serious accident or that they were behind bars and in need of cash to make bail.
In those scenarios, the fraudsters needed a second person to collect money from the intended victim while they spoke over the phone.
Elias admitted he received orders to collect money from the people leading the scam, including Steven Devantro, 36, a Montreal resident who is serving a six-year prison term for having run a grandparent scam in several parts of Quebec, including in Trois-Rivières where his case was heard.
Elias hoped to collect $5,000 and get out of the network quickly, his lawyer told Despots. But he sometimes would end up on standby for an entire day and not collect a cent. When he was arrested by the Sûreté du Québec in 2016, investigators had evidence that Elias collected more than $106,000 from 22 victims between Feb. 19 and March 30, 2016.
The police were able to recover less than half of what the victims lost.
Included among the evidence were the addresses of several victims that Elias searched for on Google Maps on his smartphone.
When he was arrested, Elias admitted to the police that he had taken orders from Devantro and that the ringleader seemed to exclusively select elderly women as targets.
In some cases, the victims were physically challenged. Devantro would use the website Canada 411 seeking the telephone numbers of women with family names common in Quebec for centuries. He would also scan online death notices looking for widows to prey on. Most of his victims were between the ages of 64 and 92. He bilked one woman in St-Jérôme out of $19,000.
“When the banks opened, I went to work,” Elias was quoted as having told the police following his arrest. “It was up to (Devantro and the other fraudsters) to decide when they would give up (on an intended victim.)”
In some cases, Elias would stay with an intended victim for several hours while the fraudsters tried to convince the elderly person that they were related.
Elias’s lawyer informed Despots that Elias testified as a prosecution witness and provided evidence against the fraudsters in a case heard in Trois-Rivières. Two of the men he testified against — Alexandre Dubé and David Perez Sauvé — were respectively sentenced to 10- and 12-month prison terms in May.
Despots agreed to order that a pre-sentence report be prepared before Elias is sentenced. Such documents are used to provide a judge with an offender’s complete background before sentence recommendations are made.