The National Police arrested two men, aged 32 and 58, of Spanish origin, in the Valencian city of Sagunto, for allegedly reporting a fake scam as a pretext to squat a chalet where they had already been living for weeks. They are accused of the crimes of breaking and entering, theft, damage, simulation of a crime and falsification of documents.
The Local Judicial Police Brigade of Sagunto opened the investigation after receiving a complaint from a man who claimed to have paid 10,000 euros in cash to a friend to rent a house, but upon arriving to live in the property he realized that it belonged to someone else.
The now-arrested man told officers he had lost contact with the alleged scammer and could not leave the house due to his lack of cash – he provided two payment receipts and a contract signed in a woman’s name – and an alleged medical condition.
However, several inconsistencies in his story allowed the officers to corroborate that it was a simulation of a crime to justify the search of the second home of a married couple.
Investigators discovered that the contract presented by the complainant was false: he had used the data of a woman who had lost her identity card months before without his knowledge and had even forged her signature.
In the same way, they located the owners of the chalet, a couple residing in another autonomous community, who were unaware of what had happened and wanted to report the events. The police also confirmed that the detainees were already spending the night in the property weeks before reporting the false scam.
By urgent court order, they evicted the residents and returned the house to its owners, who had suffered damage and on which two electric scooters, a quad bike, two bicycles and a television had been stolen. The arrested persons, with numerous criminal records, were brought to justice.
