Go directly to jail!
Locked up, gang that used Monopoly cash to dupe jewellers
A GANG of conmen who fooled jewellery dealers with Monopoly money to collect £7million have gone directly to jail.
The ‘ingenious’ thieves used the toy money hidden among real notes in stacks of cash.
The biggest single con saw celebrity jewellery dealer John Calleija – whose clients include Zara Phillips and Colin Firth – defrauded of £6.1million.
The con artists even built their own desk in which a man could hide and swap the genuine and fake notes in the drawers as the deals took place.
But the game ended for the five fraudsters last week as they were sent to jail for a total of 22 years.
Judge Julian Lambert, sentencing at Bristol Crown Court, told them: ‘You operated as a crime group, using reconnaissance and meticulous planning. It required considerable ingenuity and effort to establish dishonest ends.’
Mr Calleija, who owns a shop in the Royal Arcade on London’s Old Bond Street, was duped after he was told an investor had five million euros to splash on diamonds.
Gang leader Gianni Accamo, posing as a gem expert, went to inspect his stock of precious stones and a deal was struck at a Covent Garden hotel. Mr Calleija and a bodyguard then used his cash counting machine to sift through bundles of 500 euro notes, totalling 7.7million euros. But when they turned their backs to put the machine away, the tricksters switched the real euros for bundles of counterfeit cash.
The diamonds were then collected from Mr Calleija’s shop and it was only when the gang were long gone that he discovered he had been scammed. Prosecutor David Hughes said: ‘You can imagine the horror when he goes to check the cash.
‘It is immediately apparent it is not the same that he had counted in the hotel. At some point during that fatal turn around to put that cash counting machine away, the real money has been switched.’
Similar scams involving Monopoly euros were pulled off in Bristol, Wiltshire and Leeds. Each bill had the word ‘Monopoly’ or ‘facsimile’ written on it in large letters but this was hidden by a band being used to hold the bundles together. In Bristol the criminals committed a £420,000 fraud involving Walesbased jeweller Jack Cohen, who struck a deal to sell watches and diamonds. Members of the gang met him at the Marriott Hotel, Bristol in August 2014 and paid him real euros for the watches and a banker’s draft for the diamonds.
After a problem was found with the draft, it was agreed Mr Cohen would be given euros to cover it until it was corrected the next day.
He was handed bundles of 100 euro bills totalling more than 500,000 euros – but did not notice they were board game notes until later, the court heard. In Leeds, jeweller Marvin Santos lost nine expensive watches and a diamond-linked gold chain worth £200,000 to the con gang in autumn 2014.
Accamo, 44, Dusica Nikolic, 45, Dragoslav Djordjevic, 44, and his sons Juliano Nikolic, 26, and Bruno Nikolic, 27 were all jailed on Friday.
Serbian-born Djordjevic, of Nottingham, also admitted a £250,000 theft in a separate scam in Wiltshire. He was jailed for seven years and four months after admitting plotting fraud in Bristol, theft in Wiltshire and money laundering.
Accamo, of no fixed address, was convicted in May of the Leeds scam but a jury failed to return a verdict on his part in the Bristol job. He was jailed for six years for his role in the Leeds and London frauds. He admitted his part in the London scam.
Juliano Nikolic, of Nottingham, admitted plotting fraud in Bristol and money laundering. He was jailed for four years and four months. Bruno Nikolic, of Gainsborough, Lincolnshire, admitted conspiracy to commit fraud in the Bristol scam and was jailed for 22 months.
Dusica Nikolic, of Nottingham, had admitted concealing criminal property and was jailed last September for two-and-half years.