Man jailed for impersonating a lawyer to swindle 700,000 euros in purchase of Mijas apartment

A Malaga court has sentenced a man to eleven months in prison for attempted fraud, as he tried to pocket almost 700,000 euros from a buyer of a flat in Mijas by impersonating the lawyer who was handling the transaction. As stated in the ruling, which Europa Press has had access to, the victim was in the process of purchasing an apartment in Mijas and was being assisted by a lawyer from Marbella, who sent them an email indicating the bank account to which the agreed payments should be made. But a few days later, the accused sent an email to the buyer "impersonating the lawyer from an email account that was practically the same as the one of the law firm, as he had created a similar email account by changing a letter", the court pointed out.

In this email, the defendant instructed him to make the agreed transfers to another bank account "with the intention of unjust enrichment", since, the court said, it was an account held by a company of which he was the sole administrator.

Then, the buyer, "trusting that this second email came from the lawyer", transferred from his account in Switzerland first the amount of 62,000 euros and then another 632,321 euros. When the lawyer did not receive the funds, he contacted the buyer, who informed him that the funds had been transferred and sent him the supporting documents.

At that moment, according to the court, they were "aware of what had happened, so they informed their bank, which blocked the transfers and returned the funds transferred to the defendant's account to the injured party".

According to the court, it was "'an act of misappropriation of assets motivated by the deception carried out by the defendant, which led the victim of the crime to mistakenly believe that he was sending certain sums of money to their lawyer’s account for the purchase of an apartment, when in fact the money was sent to the account specified by the perpetrator of the crime".

According to the court, he used an email address "practically the same as that of the lawyer with the intention of obtaining illicit profit, without actually pocketing the money for reasons beyond his control", as the transfer of the funds was blocked.

Furthermore, following police investigations, it was discovered that the accused was the sole administrator of the company that held the bank account "and therefore the one who was going to benefit illicitly from these amounts, and so he set up his deceitful manoeuvre that led to the displacement of assets".

It was "the deceit preceding the main element that governed his fraudulent conduct, which leads to the conclusion that we are dealing with an aggravated attempted fraud offence", the court stated, for which he is sentenced to eleven months' imprisonment and a fine of 1,500 euros.