A man who scammed people out of nearly $300,000 by pretending to be a police officer has been arrested.<\/p>\n
On Monday the 25-year-old man, a UK national, was chased by police through Auckland central on foot.<\/p>\n
The scam involved a call to a landline by someone pretending to be a police officer and providing a fake badge number.<\/p>\n
There were 18 Aucklanders, aged between 56 and 90, with the majority over 80, allegedly duped out of money.<\/p>\n
“The scam will always involve this so-called officer asking for financial information or asking you to withdraw cash to be collected as part of an investigation into banks,” Detective Senior Sergeant Craig Bolton said.<\/p>\n
The man faces 22 charges of obtains by deception, attempting to obtain by deception and escaping custody.<\/p>\n
He was due to appear in the Auckland District Court on Tuesday.<\/p>\n
His bail will be opposed by police.<\/p>\n
“We will allege in court that this man, who only arrived in New Zealand in early June, was on his way at the time to collect more cash from a previous victim,” Bolton said.<\/p>\n
“Instead, real detectives turned up at the victim’s doorstep to advise him he was about to be scammed out of $20,000 in cash.<\/p>\n
“Financial Crime investigators from all three policing districts’ fraud teams in T\u0101maki Makaurau have been working together to piece together this offending, and this is a great outcome.”<\/p>\n
A total of $297,700 in cash was lost by victims.<\/p>\n
Source: RNZ<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A man who scammed people out of nearly $300,000 by pretending to be a police officer has been arrested. On Monday the 25-year-old man, a UK national, was chased by police through Auckland central on foot. The scam involved a call to a landline by someone pretending to be a police officer and providing a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":10474,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[174],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10473","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-nz-news"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10473","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10473"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10473\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10475,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10473\/revisions\/10475"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/10474"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10473"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10473"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10473"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}