Vancouver cops apparently thought it was a bit suspicious when they pulled over a guy with a bag full of mail. They were apparently right, after they discovered that the Fort Lauderdale resident was allegedly running an international, multimillion-dollar mail-fraud scheme.
Juan Hernandez, a 28-year-old Colombian citizen and Fort Lauderdale resident, was pulled over for an illegal turn last month when Vancouver traffic cops pulled him over, according to the Toronto Sun.
When the cops noticed he had a big bag o' mail on his passenger seat, they thought they'd gotten lucky and caught a mail thief. They got a little luckier than that.
Vancouver cops say they uncovered an international fraud based in Florida that covered ten countries, including several in Europe as well as New Zealand, Australia, and Canada.
A Vancouver police detective described the discovery of the fraud to that of a gift-giving fat man.
"To have this guy pulled over by patrol and he's got a bag of evidence sitting on his front seat, it's like Christmas," he told the Sun.
Hernandez had allegedly been ripping off old people with a mail fraud scam, sending letters to the victims claiming they'd won some lottery cash.
As a rich Nigerian prince once said, you have to send me some fee money first before I can send you your millions of dollars.
Hernandez allegedly sent the letters saying they needed to send him the $30 fee to give people their lottery winnings of around $2 million and apparently that worked against more than 5,000 people, according to the Sun.
He had apparently just gotten to the Vancouver area a few weeks before being caught and already had four post office boxes set up to receive his payments from victims, all between the ages of 68 and 94, the paper says.
The cops in Vancouver opened one of the post office boxes, which had 200 checks waiting for Hernandez.
Vancouver cops are reportedly working with authorities in the United States to find the rest of Hernandez's alleged fraud pals in Florida.
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