The Provincial Court of Valencia has sentenced a man to two years in prison on fraud charges for cheating on his girlfriend by posing as a professional athlete in order to get her to give him money.
The now convicted man and the victim met in June 2017 through a social network and, after several conversations, began a romantic relationship. The man, who has already been convicted of fraud, was interested in the woman’s economic situation and told her “mendaciously”, as the sentence says, that he had shops in Marbella and ran a terrace in a luxury club in the city of Malaga. He also told him that he was a professional footballer, played for an English team, made a lot of money there and that he had “significant amounts of money in banks in Andorra and Spain”. To give more credibility to the lie, he wrote a fake contract with Levante UD and an alleged bank document reflecting that he had 96,000 euros.
“Because of this appearance,” it says in the resolution, and using the excuse of his lack of liquidity because he had a fixed-term deposit at the bank, the convict asked the victim for money with the obligation to return it. That earned him up to 7,500 euros, which he now has to return. But the victim became suspicious and traveled to Las Palmas, where they stayed at the scammer’s mother’s house, saying they couldn’t stay at his luxury development because the Treasury Department was inspecting it. According to the victim herself, “From day one, she saw that she was a separated, stupid mother, and she took advantage of it.”
In the verdict, the court assumes that the convict concocted the deception from the beginning of the relationship and later posed as a “successful businessman who at the same time mixed this facet and the alleged love that pursued him” in order to get money to demand.
The court adds that all of the fake soccer player and businessman’s fraudulent maneuvers caused an error in the victim “who believed not only in the sentimental relationship they had, but also in their economic viability and in that rate of return,” which he agreed with him to give the money.
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