It should have been called Lino Shopping Appeven if the name had to be Lino the Money-Saving Pig. A funny name for an application intended for smartphones that was just supposed to help you save some money. It’s not clear how. And maybe it’s also likely that their developers didn’t understand it either, since the app was never launched. Currently on Google Play there is just an app called Linen dedicated to skin care. The only money that passed through here was that of an elderly woman residing in Trentino Alto-Adige: a single investor who had financed the app project with 200,000 euros.
Many of the details of this story have been omitted, perhaps for protect the woman’s identity. Reconstructing what happened starting from local newspapers we see how the woman, approximately 80 years oldhad been convinced by two men to invest in an app by two men. This time we are not talking about two strangers or two who had contacted her on social media. There were two men, around 50 years. Both acquaintances of the woman, who had already cultivated a relationship with her for years.
According to what the Corriere del Trentino reports, the two convinced the old woman to throw yourself into this investmentobviously promising huge returns. The Lino il Maialino Save Money app was ready to be launched and generate revenues, thus multiplying all the invested capital. As in the most classic of scams, the moment of return never arrived: once invested, the money disappeared. At the moment the Judge for Preliminary Investigations of Trento would have signed a seizure decree of approximately 200,000 euros. Not all, we read, are recoverable.
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The elderly and technology-based scams: the investment problem
On Fanpage.it we have talked many times about scams related to digital investments, especially for the elderly. The terrain seems easy to beat. The victims are often people with a good saving capacityfew technological skills and perhaps alone. Without close relatives or friends to advise on their operations. Very often the hook of these scams are all advertisements with famous faces that we see flowing on social media.
The advertisement leads to a fake newspaper article, the newspaper article leads to a form where you can leave your data and from here you arrive at an investment platform. At this point an endless chain of calls begins, made by call centers around the world that try to convince the victim to invest your savings. Certain. The difference between these scams and the one that led the elderly woman to lose 200,000 euros is clear: in online scams it is strangers who call, here everything started from two people with whom there was already a relationship relationship of trust.
