Peaches Stergo, a 36-year-old Florida lady also called Alice, was arrested Wednesday on one depend of wire fraud for allegedly duping an 87-year-old man out of A$4 million that she used to purchase Rolex watches, a ship and different luxurious gadgets, the US Attorney’s Office of the Southern District of New York introduced at present.
“The defendant callously preyed on a senior citizen simply seeking companionship, defrauding him of his life savings,” stated Michael J. Driscoll, the assistant director answerable for the FBI’s New York subject workplace when saying the costs.
The allegations are the most recent in what has been a rising pattern of swindlers concentrating on customers of matchmaking web sites. Romance scams have turn into cautionary tales highlighted in common streaming sequence, equivalent to Netflix’s “The Tinder Swindler,” which instructed the tales of a number of girls who stated they have been defrauded by the identical man they met on the courting app.
Stergo, in keeping with the indictment, met the unidentified sufferer, a then-Manhattan resident, on a courting web site six or seven years in the past. By 2017, she requested him for cash to pay her legal professional so she may obtain settlement funds she claimed have been owed to her, in keeping with prosecutors. The settlement, prosecutors stated, did not exist.
Over the following 5 years, prosecutors allege, Stergo fed the sufferer steady lies to obtain nearly month-to-month checks typically in increments of $70,000. She impersonated a financial institution worker, despatched pretend invoices, and created a phony electronic mail account to reassure the sufferer that he can be repaid if he continued to deposit cash into the account, in keeping with the indictment.
Stergo used the cash to purchase a house in a gated neighborhood, a condominium, a ship, and quite a few vehicles together with a Corvette, the indictment says. Prosecutors allege she additionally used his cash to journey, purchase gold and silver bars, jewelry, and designer clothes.
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CNN has tried to achieve Stergo for remark.
By 2021, the alleged sufferer confided in his son that he had given Stergo his life financial savings primarily based on her guarantees that he can be paid again, in keeping with courtroom paperwork. After his son instructed him that he had been scammed, the sufferer stopped writing cheques. He misplaced his condo, in keeping with the indictment.
If convicted, Stergo may face as many as 20 years in jail. She is anticipated to seem in federal courtroom in Florida.
