PHOTO: The victim transferred the money from her account at this Citibank branch on Bell Boulevard in Bayside. Photo Courtesy of Google
A Brooklyn man was arrested last week and charged with duping an 85-year-old Queens woman out of $8,000 through a scam in which the woman was told that her daughter-in-law had been arrested for drug possession and that she needed to post her bail, according to Queens District Attorney Richard Brown.
Emmanuel Jean-Gilles was arraigned last Thursday evening on a criminal complaint charging him with third-degree grand larceny and third-degree criminal possession of stolen property. Jean-Gilles, who faces up to seven years in prison if convicted, was ordered held on $20,000 bond/$10,000 cash bail with a bail sufficiency hearing.
According to the charges, the victim received a call at her residence on the morning of July 22, 2015, in which a female voice indicated that she was the victim’s daughter-in-law and that she had been arrested for drug possession before handing the phone over to a male person who indicated that he was “Det. Schaefer” and that the victim’s daughter-in-law had indeed been arrested for drug possession.
The male voice then told the victim that she needed to post $8,000 in cash as bail money for her daughter-in-law, and that the money needed to be transferred into a Citibank account belonging to “Emmanuel Jean-Gilles” to which he gave her the account number.
Allegedly, the male voice then indicated to the victim that he was going to call her a taxi and that she should get into any taxi that arrived at her residence. According to the complaint, Brown said, when a taxi did arrive at the victim’s residence, she got into the vehicle, which took her to a Citibank branch on Bell Boulevard in Bayside, where she transferred $8,000 into the account as instructed.
Surveillance footage from a Citibank branch on Pennsylvania Avenue in Brooklyn allegedly showed Jean-Gilles completing a transaction at a teller window approximately three hours after the victim received the initial phone call. During the transaction, Jean-Gilles allegedly withdrew $6,000 from his account; and less than an hour later, a debit card purchase in the amount of $981.65 was made on the account, and another $500 was withdrawn from it.
Jean-Gilles was ordered to return to court on Oct. 22.
