CBC News is investigating grandparents’ scams and their link with Montreal. This story is the first part of a series of three parts.
In June 2024, eight young men and women worked the phones inside a two-story building on squatting next to Lakeshore Road in Pointe-Claire, a suburbio in The West Island of Montreal, when police officers broke out.
In an accusation revealed earlier this month, Michael Drescher, Vermont’s district prosecutor, said the group was caught in the event that day. They were making phone calls to “older victims in Virginia”, pretending to be their grandchildren and asking for money.
Drescher claimed that the group, and another 17 Canadians, almost all in the area of Montreal, and many of the West Island suburbs, were part of an elaborate network of international scammers that disappointed hundreds of people of American people from a total of more than $ 21 million of the USA.
The accusation details how the group, and its alleged accomplices, made a carefully choreographed fraud, known as a grandparents’ scam, in multiple call centers in the Montreal area, supposedly under the leadership of Gareth West, 38 years of Burlington, Ontario.
But it was not the first time that the police officers assaulted the scam call centers in the Montreal area and arrested groups, called “cells” in judicial documents, involved in grandparents’ scams.
CBC News discovered that the police pointed to a similar network scams that operates in Montreal only a few months before it was surprisingly similar to the recent case. Police and experts say that scams seem to be related to organized crime.
‘Hello grandmother’
American officials believe that the alleged operation of West grandparents began in the summer of 2021, a few months after the authorities broke a different operation allegedly directed by a Montrealer called Anthony David Di Rienzo.
A summary of the facts presented in the court that details the accusations against Di Rienzo says that his scam began in 2019 and was executed until March 24, 2021, when the police arrested 15 people in the area of Montreal and simultaneously arrested complicit whose work was to raise money from the victims.
The accusations against Di Rienzo and his group reflect those of West and his group.
For example, both networks went exclusively to the elderly in the US, both involved multiple “cells” that operated from “call centers.” Both teams used in the United States whose work was to collect the money sent by a victim to abandoned or vacancies in the United States.
Police have raided several scam operations of major grandparents in Montreal in recent years, arrested scammers who allegedly shook the victims of millions of dollars. We break up what we discover about the scams and who impact.
The judicial documents presented in the case of Di Rienzo allege that the group attacked the elderly and varied the states that called every day because they believed it was more difficult for the police to track them.
The authorities in the United States and Canada have leveled similar claims against the two groups allegedly led by West and Di Rienzo. The groups allegedly had similar organizational structures and chose their victims in similar ways: the police say that the chief of the Network delivered daily lists of possible victims to the cells.
These lists contained information, including the name, age, address, telephone number and income of possible victims. Neither the judicial documents submitted in the US. Or in Canada they say where these lists come from, but the police have said that the information could come from data leaks or even publicly available sources.
The cells called the victims and, according to the conversation recordings obtained by the police through the telephone listeners in the case of Di Rienzo, each call began with the same words: “Hello, grandfather” or “Hello, grandmother”.
What followed was carefully orchestrated fraud to convince the old victim that the scammer was actually the victim’s grandson and needed money. Usually, they said they had been unfairly accused of a drug crime and required a guarantee, generally around $ 9,000 per bail.
Once the victim was properly convinced, other members of the cell called them, this time pretending to be police officers or lawyers, giving them the details of how and where to send the money.
Judicial documents both in the United States and Canada say that Di Rienzo and West’s scams used that same strategy to convince hundreds of American elderly people to send money, but attacked thousands of possible victims. Each cell supposedly called dozens of people per day.
But all the time, both groups attracted the attention of the police in the United States and in Montreal, ending in their possible arrests and criminal charges.
A spokesman for the Provincial Police Force of Quebec, the Sûreté du Québec (SQ), which was very involved in the operation that led to Di Rienzo’s arrest, said that the two investigations were separated and that the police had not linked them.
Steve Belzil, head of the Division of Economic Crimes in the Police Service of the Ville de Montréal, The Montreal Police and its partners in the Provincial Police of Ontario and national security in the United States have been actively in investigating grandparents’ scammers in Montreal.
But he said that scam call centers operate throughout the country, not only in Montreal. However, he pointed out that city investigators have established links between grandparents’ scam networks and largest organized crimes groups.
Organized Crimes Links
Belzil Said the main networks of grandparents in Montreal tend to have connections with the Italian mafia.
That March 2021, when the Police made raids in Montreal and in the United States, arrested Di Rienzo’s group, the Quebec Provincial Police arrested a man named Francesco Sollecito.
The name of Sollecito appears in judicial documents linked to the case as a “relevant person” who communicated with the name “Frank”.
But although the documents say it was arrested alongside Di Rienzo and the rest of the group that were later accused, Sollecito did not.
A spokesman for the director of criminal prosecutions in Quebec, the DPCP, said they could not, in this case, reveal the reasons why there were no charges. Sollecito has never been accused of a crime in Quebec.
Sollecito is one of Rocco Sollecito’s children, who was an ally of the Rizzutos, the reputed criminal family that ruled the Montreal mafia for years. Rocco was shot dead in Laval, which, in 2016.
But there are rumors that his son Stefano Sollecito, Francesco’s brother, may have assumed the position of one of the Mafia bosses in MontrealAccording to Antonio Nicaso, an expert in the mafia who has written more than 40 books on organized crime and teaches the subject at Queen University.
Stefano was accused of gangsterism and conspiracy for traffic narcotics, but was acquitted in 2018.
Nicaso said that organized crime has been trying to diversify its income flows and may have been looking to see if grandparents are a viable source of income.
And if they are not yet involved, it is very likely that they will be soon, he said.
“I have the feeling that this is what happened or what will happen in the near future because there is a lot of money to win,” he said.
The scammers are becoming more sophisticated. Here are some tips on how to help their family members identify a potential scam.
Judgment at the end of this year
The men who are supposedly behind Di Rienzo’s scam group have been accused of conspiracy to commit fraud, fraud and fraud attempt. His case is recovering through the courts and could go to trial at the end of this year.
The 25 people recently accused in the West Group face charges of wire fraud in the United States, most of them face a maximum fine of 20 years in prison if it is convicted, but the supposed leaders of the group could spend 40 years after bars if it is convicted. Two of them, West and Jimmy Ylimaki remain free.
None of the charges have been tested in court.
