WRITING.- Between 2014 and 2019, an elderly woman began to receive calls from a neighbor who posed as God and the Virgin, and asked her to deposit increasing amounts of money in a drawer at her natural treatment store which he called “the bank of heaven”.
He told her that the interest there earned more than in banks on earth and that she could also build a house in heaven next to those of her deceased mother and husband. The victim delivered all her savings and came to ask for two credits to comply with the deliveries.
The case reached the Provincial Court of León last Wednesday and the Prosecutor’s Office requests 8 years in prison for the León resident accused of defrauding the elderly woman of more than 250,000 euros. The defendant would have taken advantage of her mental state to convince the victim, that she remains convinced that she has been named a saint.
This is how “the bank of heaven” worked
“I have been a saint since 2013. On a car trip I felt hands on my shoulders and when I got home they took me to the bathroom. There, in the mirror, he wrote in blood ‘I am the Virgin, here I shed all my blood. My daughter, you are holy. She erases this with that sponge,’” the woman assures. However, she is aware that the whole money thing is the result of a scam.
The defendant has denied the facts despite the fact that in the trial last Wednesday a recording was heard in which he faked several voices to speak with the woman and threatened her with “killing her children and leaving her alone in life” if she told something. The woman did not tell her children anything until she was drowned in debt.
The money has not appeared but the defendant closed his business, which he has acknowledged generated debts, a few months after the complaint was filed and the contributions were cut off.
