A lawyer who extorted money from relatives of dead and missing soldiers will be tried in Lviv
DBR employees completed the pre-trial investigation of the Lviv swindler lawyer, who, under the guise of assistance, profited from the families of dead and missing soldiers. He faces up to 12 years in prison, the indictment has already been sent to court.
The investigation established that the attacker trusted the legal counsel of one of the military units, who took care of the families of dead and missing soldiers. He represented the swindler as a lawyer capable of quickly solving the issue of obtaining state aid and other related problems.
One of his victims was a resident of Lviv Oblast, whose husband died in the fighting in Donetsk Oblast. A woman with cancer was left alone with four children. The lawyer convinced her that there might be difficulties with receiving assistance, and offered to “negotiate” in Kyiv for 30% of the amount of payments. Realizing that the money would be assigned to her anyway, he decided to take advantage of the situation.
In addition, the fraudster demanded 25,000 hryvnias for his “services” every month, met the woman in restaurants and had fun at her expense. He even offered to draw up a will in his favor so that after her death the children would not quarrel over money.
To hide the scheme, the lawyer forced the victim to open a bank account in her name and send him a card with a pin code. He forwarded the package to a friend who checked the balance. About 800,000 hryvnias were subsequently withdrawn from the account. After another misappropriation of funds, the swindler was detained by the State Bureau of Investigation.
Another victim was a woman from the Lviv region, whose husband went missing during the fighting in the Luhansk region. The lawyer convinced her that he had connections to search in the occupied territories and even in Russia. He insisted on starting the search as soon as possible, claiming that her husband’s life depended on it. In this way, he cheated her of 460,000 hryvnias, after which he changed his phone number.
In general, the fraudster caused more than 1 million hryvnias to the victims and planned to take another 1 million 150 thousand hryvnias from one of the women as an additional “payment”. The figure will be tried for fraud (Part 4 of Article 190, Part 2 of Article 15, Part 5 of Article 190 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine). If the court proves his guilt, he faces up to 12 years in prison. Procedural management in the case was carried out by the Specialized Prosecutor’s Office in the field of defense of the Western region.
