Where are the medlars? Half a million euros lost in the Nazarene scam.

BarcelonaNazarenes, dressed in tunics and hoods, are the companions of the floats in a procession during Holy Week. But it is also the name given to one of the oldest scams, and there are several theories that explain it. The Nazarene scam consists of a fake businessman who goes to a company and places orders for a product that is already on the market. Although he never pays for the order, he does end up selling the merchandise. Some theories say that, since the scamming company later receives a procession of creditors, the name Nazareno was ultimately chosen. Others argue that, since the scam occurs in stages (like those during Holy Week), the name ultimately comes from here. Be that as it may, it remains a common scam, as demonstrated by a recent case: an Alicante cooperative dedicated to fruit production lost half a million euros in loquats.

According to ARA, this case is already under judicial review in the Tarragona courts, and two people are under investigation. It all dates back to June 9, 2023, when the representative of the Alicante cooperative filed a complaint with the Civil Guard. He said that a man presented himself as a mediator for three fruit companies, "solvent and internationally recognized," according to the complaint. The contact was by phone, and the man wanted to buy loquats. The next contact was by email, sent by another man, a prior partner of the first, who sent the tax information to invoice the fruit. And we're not talking about just a few loquats: the cooperative, at the request of the two alleged businessmen, made 50 land shipments of loquats, with a value of more than half a million euros.

The companies receiving the fruit were the three mentioned by the mediator, but first the pallets of loquats made a logistical stop at Mercabarna, near the port of Barcelona. The fruit arrived, but none of the three companies mentioned picked it up, but a different one did. And time passed. Normally, invoices for these large orders are paid within a few days or weeks, and when that time period passed, the cooperative manager saw that no payment had been made.

The first thing the association did was contact the companies that had supposedly purchased the loquats, but their response was that they had neither placed the order nor knew who the alleged intermediary was. The three loquat orders, including the fruit shipped, collected, and ultimately lost, had totaled 515,000 euros. As soon as the Civil Guard took over the investigation, officers began to talk about the Nazarene scam.

The police investigation

The Civil Guard tracked the phone numbers and email addresses (which mimicked the companies' corporate addresses) used by the alleged fraudsters to contact the cooperative, as well as the logistics company that received the loquats at Mercabarna. The phone numbers were supposedly fake, and the logistics company responded that it had been hired by another company. But, while the investigation was underway, a parallel question loomed: Where were the loquats? The Civil Guard maintains that, in all likelihood, they had been sent and sold to Italy, one of the main consumers of this fruit, since there is a ship in the Port of Barcelona that connects directly with that country, and the companies involved had Italian ties.

Defense sources for the suspects point out that the cooperative did not take any self-protection measures and, therefore, question whether there was enough deception to be considered a scam. That is, they add that, in this type of sale, the cooperative hires an insurance company to safeguard the transaction, even more so if the buyer is an internationally recognized company. Now, the defense of the defendants is trying to prove that the cooperative was not overly concerned about where it was sending the fruit because it knew it could collect from the insurance company if it didn't arrive safely.

However, based on the study of the owners of the companies involved and the fruit harvesting movements that were carried out at Mercabarna—some of them with a Porsche—the Civil Guard found two alleged perpetrators who are currently the two men under judicial investigation in Tarragona (the case was transferred to a judo court). The police believe that one of them is the mediator who contacted the Alicante cooperative by phone and the other is the one who communicated with them by email and arranged the transaction. in situ The movement of fruit at Mercabarna. The police are now referring to the case as a professional scam, well-prepared and expertly executed.