All crooks claim to have turned the page on crime. But in fact, the lure of easy money never leaves them. Here’s just one example.
“He told me he could help me get a public job for twenty thousand dirhams,” says the young man, one of the five complainants, to the magistrate of the Correctional Chamber of the Casablanca Court of First Instance.
The thirty-four-year-old defendant tried to exonerate himself. He claims to have turned his back on fraud. A statement that the judge is used to hearing from the majority of swindlers. That’s why he asked him if he had ever met the plaintiff. The answer is that he doesn’t remember. But the judge, experienced in this kind of case, knows that con artists have a good memory and remember their victims perfectly.
This young swindler, who was arrested for the second time after serving a previous prison sentence of eight months for fraud, explained during questioning that as soon as he got married, he decided to stop swindling. Father of an eight-month-old child, in the arms of his mother who was in the audience, this recidivist pretended to be a civil servant to mislead his victims and convince them that he could help them achieve their goals. Sometimes he would pass himself off as an official with the Sûreté Nationale, sometimes with the justice system…
Always dressed to the nines, he would join his victims in a rented car, convincing them that he was an important figure who could help them realize their dreams, either by recruiting them in a public institution, helping them obtain a Schengen visa, or enabling a prisoner to benefit from an acquittal or a reduced sentence, etc. Promises which were obviously not kept, followed by the disappearance of the person concerned, a change of telephone number, etc. Each of the five victims claimed to have paid him the sum of twenty thousand dirhams. Each of the five victims claimed to have paid him the sum of twenty thousand dirhams. On the contrary, the accused specified that he had never met three of them and that he did not remember whether or not he had met the other two. He added that, prior to his arrest, he was involved in trading.
Taking the floor, the deputy public prosecutor requested the maximum sentence against the defendant. As for the defense lawyer, he called for his client’s acquittal, basing his argument on the fact that he denied having met the complainants and that he was no longer involved in scamming. But the court found him guilty and sentenced him to eighteen months’ imprisonment.
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