Azimet Köylüoğlu, a former state minister, became the latest victim of Turkey’s notorious phone scammers, according to a report published by the Sabah newspaper on Wednesday.
The scam started last month like any other, with fraudsters telephoning their victim, telling him that his bank accounts were “compromised” after “scammers hijacked them.” A scammer introduced himself to Köylüoğlu, a civil engineer who served as state minister in charge of human rights between 1994 and 1995, as “Chief Prosecutor for Antalya.” Köyluoğlu, who lives alone in the western province of Izmir, believed the scammer’s claim as they had detailed information about his bank accounts.
Another scammer contacted Köylüoğlu pretending to be a police officer. He sought more information about the mobile banking passwords of the victim, telling him that he needed to withdraw money and hand it over to the “police” so their serial numbers could be “verified.”
Köylüoğlu, believing that his money would be returned later, allowed them to withdraw. Scammers posing as police officers telephoned Köylüoğlu once an hour for 20 days to gain their victim's trust. He was also told to cutoff contact with anyone throughout the "investigation," and Köylüoğlu did not leave home or call anyone for 20 days.
It was the scammers’ greed that ultimately foiled the scam. When scammers told him that he should sell his house in Istanbul’s Sarıyer district that was apparently the target of “scammers” that did not exist, Köylüoğlu traveled to Istanbul to realize the sale. The house, however, was registered in the name of the victim’s son. Köylüoğlu could not sell the house on his own and when he contacted his son, he helped him to realize that his father was the victim of a massive scam. The former minister filed a criminal complaint while the "real" police launched an investigation to capture the suspects. It is unclear how much Köylüoğlu was defrauded.
In recent years, phone scams have proliferated in Turkey and mainly target elderly people living alone. They exploit people’s trust in security services and fear of getting entangled in an investigation. More often than not, they made their victims believe that their name came up in investigations related to terrorist groups, namely the Gülenist Terror Group (FETÖ) and the PKK. Through persuasion combined with prior knowledge of personal information about their victims that they have carefully studied, they made them send money “to verify if their money were used in activities of terrorist groups.”
The latest high-profile victims were two professors living in Istanbul, Ahmet Demirel, who handed out $712,000 (TL 10 million) to scammers and sociology expert Nilüfer Narlı, who gave away her $35,000 (TL 500,000) and jewelry.
