Alex Trelinski
A MAN who scammed €90,000 in just over six months from people using his fake real estate website has been arrested in Alicante Province.
The Policia Nacional tracked him down by accessing the geo-locator in his mobile phone and apprehended him in a Teulada street as he was walking with two people.
The man had previously been arrested in Madrid last January over the online scam after he had been investigated for two years.
Despite that arrest, he continued to keep the site active to extract yet more money from victims.
A Denia court jailed him and he will be transferred to the Canaries for the prosecution to continue.
His fresh offences committed between late January and August 10 involved 36 people being defrauded of amounts varying between €850 and €6000 which they deposited into different bank accounts as payments for rental contracts.
The website offered a wide variety of apartments for rent and sale on Tenerife but he had no authority to carry out any deals.
The man used a variety of fake identities to avoid being located- even using details of some of his victims to open up bank accounts.
One of the usurped identities was a Monovar man who contacted the fraudster in February over a job advert looking for a driver.
After an interview, he kept the applicant’s ID card and never returned it.
Illegally-obtained bank and credit cards were used to rent luxury cars and to buy jewellery from Alicante province businesses.
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