Sold two phones on Leboncoin and was paid in counterfeit money

In Cannes, counterfeit money isn't just to be found in films. It's also on Leboncoin! Earlier this week, a woman wanted to secure the sale of two smartphones by hand-delivering them and paying in cash. Except she ended up with €850 in counterfeit notes.

On the surface, everything was perfect

After reaching an agreement with a buyer on the classified ads site, the seller was ready to complete the sale. Two men arrived at her home to complete the transaction. The two smartphones, worth a total of €850, were paid for with 17 €50 notes. Flabbergasted, the seller was unable to see immediately that she had just been conned by the buyer. As a result, she was left with counterfeit notes and nothing she could do. The two men had already moved on.

At the police station that received the victim, an officer explained: "By the time the victim realised that there was indeed a problem with the tickets, they had left. Getting them to come to her house was just as dangerous: they could have assaulted her.

A rapid investigation with astonishing results

It turns out that, thanks to video surveillance images of the surrounding area and telephone data, the two criminals were identified in a very short space of time. The icing on the cake was that one of them was very well known to the police. It was he who had made the transaction with the counterfeit notes, and he intended to keep one of the smartphones for himself and compensate his accomplice with the other. But the end use of the phones that the swindler had in mind was quite different: to be used by an international drug trafficking network.

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