A gang of conmen who used Monopoly money to trick jewellery dealers in a £7m scam have been ordered to go to jail.
The toy cash was sometimes sandwiched between real euro notes in piles of money, and on other occasions the word “Monopoly” was covered by paper bands used to hold the bundles together.
At Bristol crown court, the judge, Julian Lambert, told the gang: “The fraud operated required you men to establish confidence in your victims so it was thought you could be trusted. You operated as a crime group, using reconnaissance and meticulous planning. It required considerable ingenuity and effort to establish dishonest ends.”
In the biggest single swindle, jeweller John Calleija, who has a shop in the Royal Arcade, Old Bond Street, central London, and who counts royalty and actors among his clients, was defrauded of £6.1m.
Gang member Gianni Accamo, posing as a gem expert, went to inspect his stock of precious stones and a deal was struck at a Covent Garden hotel. Calleija and a bodyguard then used his cash-counting machine to sift through bundles of genuine notes, amounting to almost €8m.
When the pair turned their backs to put the machine away, the tricksters switched the real euros for bundles of counterfeit cash.
The jewels were collected from Calleija’s shop and it was only when the gang were long gone that he discovered he had been scammed.
David Hughes, prosecuting, said: “You can imagine the horror when he goes to check the cash. It is immediately apparent it is not the same that he had counted in the hotel. It’s counterfeit.
“At some point during that fatal turn around to put that cash-counting machine away, the real money has been switched, the fake money has been substituted and the criminals had disappeared with the diamonds.”
Similar scams were pulled off in Bristol and Leeds. In Bristol, jeweller Jack Cohen fell victim to a £420,000 fraud. Gang members met him at the Marriott hotel and paid him real euros for watches and a banker’s draft for some diamonds.
After a problem was discovered with the draft, it was agreed that the jeweller would be given euros to cover the cost until it was corrected the next day. He was handed bundles of notes and didn’t notice they were fake money until later.
Accamo, 44, Dusica Nikolic, 45, Dragoslav Djordjevic, 44, Juliano Nikolic, 26, and Bruno Nikolic, 27 were jailed.
Accamo, of no fixed address, was jailed for six years. Djordjevic, of Nottingham, was jailed for seven years and four months. Djordjevic’s son Juliano Nikolic, also of Nottingham, was jailed for four years and four months. His brother Bruno, of Gainsborough, Lincs, was jailed for 22 months.
Dusica Nikolic, of Nottingham, was jailed in September for two and a half years.
Some of the fraudsters were arrested in November 2014 at an address in Nottingham, where police found fake notes and £150,000 in sterling, euros and dollars. Officers also retrieved stolen jewellery hidden under soil in plant pots.