Using monopoly money to scam a jeweler for diamonds
isn’t the craziest scam in this video. One group of guys also duped victims
into believing they were buying lamps that had genies in it!
4 - Monopoly Money Bruno Nikolic
Bruno Nikolic was arrested and jailed for using monopoly money in million-dollar deals,
and he’s just one member of a big family operation. His brother, Juliano, and their father,
Dragoslav, along with gang leaders Gianni Accamo and Dusica Nikolic,
conspired to covertly swap real cash with toy money when it was time to pay up.
Basically, they would hide the fake money among the real cash to make the deal go through.
Then, they used a unique desk to swap many real notes with Monopoly money during the exchanges.
The family defrauded their clients out of more than 7 million pounds.
Jeweler John Calleja
The Nikolic family didn't shy away from their crimes when faced with an expert, despite the
risk. They went on to scam the world-famous master jeweler John Calleja out of 6.1 million pounds.
Calleja has designed diamond masks, bracelets, and necklaces for celebrity catwalks and
prestigious events and worn by people such as Madonna, and members of the royal family.
Some of his other clients include Zara Phillips and Colin Firth. Calleja is especially famous
for his pink diamond designer collection, which has won him many awards worldwide.
So when the Nikolic family struck a deal with Calleja,
they knew they'd struck more than gold. They hit diamonds!
Gang member Gianni Accamo, claiming to be a gem expert, inspected Calleja's stones at the Covent
Garden Hotel and offered him a deal. When it came time to exchange the cash for the diamonds,
Calleja and his bodyguard worked to funnel the money into a cash counting machine. When they
turned their backs for just a moment to put the device away, the gang members switched the genuine
Euros for bundles of Monopoly money, using paper bands to cover the word "Monopoly" on the bills.
Once the process was complete, Calleja handed over
the jewels from his shop in the Royal Arcade on London's Old Bond Street.
It wasn't until the Nikolics were long gone that he realized they scammed him out of millions.
But Calleja wasn't the only one. They also carried out their crime spree in Bristol and Leeds.
In Bristol, jeweler Jack Cohen was defrauded out of 420,000
pounds. Members of the Nikolic family met him outside of the Marriott Hotel and handed over
real Euros for the watches and a cashier’s check for the diamonds.
But there was a problem with the cashier’s check..
So, the Nikolics agreed to pay the balance for the diamonds with euros. Cohen was given a bundle of
Monopoly money and didn't realize it wasn't real currency until the next day when it was too late.
Busted
In November 2014, police eventually found some of the fraudsters at a house in Nottingham,
where they had a stock of fake money, 150 pounds worth of sterling silver,
euros, and dollars. There was also an ample supply of jewelry hidden under the soil in plant pots.
Accammo, Dusica, Djordjevic, Juliano, and Bruno were arrested for the scam. Accammo was sent to
jail for six years, Duscia for two, Djordjevic for seven, Juliano for four, and Bruno for 22 months.
Aftermath
Bruno Nikolic, one of the fraudsters at the center of the scam, was released from jail
after his 22-month sentence. But he didn't learn his lesson and committed more crimes. In 2016,
he used one of his kids as a distraction while grabbing a diamond necklace and
five diamond rings from a display window at the Marshall's Yard Center
in Gainsborough. He was convicted of theft in July 2017 and was jailed for another two years.
But it seems like he still didn't learn his lesson. He’s been accused of stealing diamonds
from a private home and is now fighting extradition to Germany. He was caught
driving without a license or insurance and was disqualified from obtaining a permit for a year.
According to the judge, it seems like Bruno's extradition is a sure thing,
and he'll be leaving his pregnant wife behind.
3 - Baby Formula Tampering
In 2022, mothers were shocked to find empty shelves that were supposed to stock the baby
formula their babies depended on. Nine years before the critical shortage, people were starting
to tamper with the U.S. supply of essential baby formula. In 2017, a trio of two men and one woman
were arrested for their role in a fraud scheme that made them more than $200 million in profits.
Sherida Nabi, Johnny Grobman, and Raoul Doekhie got in on the ground floor by convincing U.S.
infant formula manufacturers to sell them products at discounted rates, sometimes up to 60% off the
original price. They claimed they had a government tender to purchase the formula on behalf of
Suriname in South America. But instead of sending the product to Suriname as they promised,
the trio turned around and sold their hoard of baby formula to U.S. citizens at full price.
Suriname To secure these huge discounts,
Nabi, Grobman, and Doekhie negotiated with baby formula manufacturers promising to deliver the
baby formula to mothers in the impoverished country of Suriname in South America.
Doekhie and Nabi set up a company based out of Suriname called Tropical Marketing & Distribution
N.V. They created a fictional government office called the Suriname Tender Office to provide false
documentation to support their scheme. They wrote out a government tender to show the companies they
were scamming, proving that they were obtaining baby formula on behalf of the nation of Suriname.
Grobman also listed himself as the manager of several
fake companies to make them look more authentic.
The trio worked together to create false purchase orders, shipping the products abroad and then
immediately bringing them back into the U.S in a process called U-Turning. Grobman submitted
fraudulent shipping documents to U.S. agents to get the tons of baby formula past customs.
Sometimes they didn't ship the product at all. One witness at trial took the stand to say that
the fraudsters covertly switched the stock of baby formula in shipping containers with
sheetrock of the same weight. They replaced the cargo seals installed
by the infant formula manufacturers to prevent tampering and used a machine to
create identical markings to avoid getting caught by customs officials and formula manufacturers.
A fourth man, Edgar Torres, collaborated with the fraudsters to pose as a
registered agent of Le Mare Transport, a phony freight forwarding company.
Grobman and Torres used their shell companies to sell the
infant formula back to American distributors and split the profits with the other two accomplices.
They defrauded about 60 companies and used their $200 million profits to buy
a $9 million mansion in Florida, a 48-foot yacht, and several international estates.
Aftermath
But one time, things didn't go according to plan. In 2017, one manufacturer cut off business with
the two after a truck driver warned the company about upcoming delays. A closer investigation
into their operation revealed that their exports to Suriname were a complete lie.
After a 13-day trial in February 2020, a federal jury found the trio guilty of wire fraud,
money laundering, and smuggling goods from the United States. Grobman, Doekhie,
and Nabi were sentenced to 18 years in federal prison and were forced to hand
over $200 million. Grobman requested a retrial, which the judge quickly denied.
2 - Leggo my Legos! Fake VAT
In May 2022, English couple Lee Hickinbottom and his partner Tabatha Knott were caught
stealing more than £1 million of taxpayers' money and using it to buy luxury cars,
expensive vacations, and top-of-the-line lego sets.
They also spent hundreds of thousands to renovate their home in Dudley, including a £13,000 pound
hot tub that was so big it had to be crane-lifted in. They spent more than £250,000 pounds on luxury
cars, £18,000 pounds on iTunes, and of course £16,000 pounds on Apple products. But the
weirdest purchase has to have been the fifteen hundred pounds spent on expensive Lego sets!
Hickinbottom set up a fake transport business, Serenity Community Transport Ltd.,
to submit claims for repayment from HMRC, which stands for Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs.
From 2014 to 2017, the pair claimed £1.2 million in VAT,
related to more than £7 million in fake invoices. But what’s a VAT?
Value Added Tax
VAT stands for Value-Added Tax. Basically, it's a tax on goods and services paid at each
level of the supply chain, from the initial manufacture to the point of sale. It’s used
instead of an income tax to raise money for the government based on consumption rather
than salary. Most countries in the European Union use a VAT system, but the United States does not.
That being said, many people scam the VAT system using something called a carousel scheme in which
a fraudulent trader imports goods without VAT and then sells the items to a distributing accomplice
who charges clients for VAT. The distributor sells the items to a series of other companies who all
pay the VAT, until it’s nearly impossible to track the manufacturer and distributor who first sold
and bought the goods without VAT. At that point, those companies have already reclaimed
VAT from the government and made a profit on the tax they never paid.
Busted
HMRC officers eventually found out about the fraud after investigating some of the claims,
even after Hickinbottom tried to cover his tracks by transferring £340,000 to family
and friends and sending £76,000 to Knott. In 2020, Hickinbottom pleaded guilty to dishonest
claims of £28,000 in Job Seekers Allowance and Employment Support Allowance from 2013 to 2016.
He and his partner were found guilty of VAT fraud in March 2022 after being
tried at Birmingham Crown Court. Knott was also convicted of money laundering. Hickinbottom was
sentenced to eight years in prison, and Knott received 18 months with a two-year suspension.
1 - The Genie Dr. Laeek Khan
When Doctor Laeek Khan met a group of occultists with a magical genie lamp in India, he couldn't
believe his eyes. He even saw a magical jinn appear from the lamp. Dr. Khan asked to touch the
genie and take the lamp home, but the men refused, saying it could cause serious harm. But Dr. Khan
couldn't live without this magical genie. The men sold the lamp to him for a whopping
£71,000, promising that it would bring him health, wealth, and good fortune for the rest of his life.
But soon after taking the lamp home, Dr. Khan realized the magical lamp didn’t have any powers,
and he'd been scammed out of thousands of pounds, amounting to seven million rupees.
The jinn he saw emerge from the lamp was just one of the men in a costume.
He reported the crime to police in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. Luckily,
the police found the scammers and arrested them in November 2020. One of their wives,
who was in on the scam, went on the run. These men have scammed several
people using the same genie plot and made millions of rupees in the process.
Jinni
A jinni, the plural form jinn, is a spirit from Arabic mythology that inhabits the Earth,
supposedly unseen by humans. They can take on many forms and make
magical things happen through their immense powers. You've all seen Aladin, right?
But Jinnis can be good or evil and can be punished and killed just like humans.
Encounters with jinnis are super rare, according to the Quran, since humans can't usually see
them. So, it's no wonder Dr. Khan took the opportunity to take a genie home once he saw
one emerge from the lamp. Unfortunately for him, this was far from a real genie.
Click to watch one of these next videos! Let us know in the comment section
what feels like a bigger scam to you, having to pay social security to the government,
or the ballot counting process for a presidential election!