On a March afternoon in Tuscany Ride Close, a Calgary woman withdrew nearly $5,000 in cash because a voice on the phone said her grandson was in jail. The man who came to her door wore the costume of a detective who did not exist.
A Shakopee grandmother heard her grandson's voice on the phone, crying about a car wreck and a jail cell. The voice wasn't her grandson. The $10,000 she shipped to New Jersey was the bait that finally caught the courier.
A transnational call-center operation allegedly turned the oldest human instinct, the urge to protect a grandchild, into a script. The runners drove Ubers. The closers wore suits no one ever saw.
Stefano Zanetti coordinated cash pickups from elderly Americans in more than 40 states. The money ran through a Panama watersports company and came out the other side as a beachfront life.
A federal indictment unsealed in Vermont this week names seven more Quebec residents in a cross-border operation that allegedly drained more than $21 million from elderly Americans by impersonating their grandchildren. The call center ran like a business. The grandparents answered like family.
Stefano Zanetti ran the U.S. side of a Montreal-built grandparent scam, coordinating couriers who collected cash from elderly victims in cities the network rotated through to stay ahead of police. A federal judge in Pittsburgh just gave him more than fifteen years.