Alleged grandparent scammers lived in luxury. Their victims lost their savings and peace of mind
Victims live with the impact of the scams for the rest of their lives, judge says
CBC News is investigating grandparent scams and their link to Montreal. This story is part two of a three-part series. Read part one here.
In 2020, months after the world shut down for COVID-19, Madeline, an American senior who had worked as a nurse all her life, got a phone call from someone from Montreal — though she didn't know that at the time.
It's unclear what the caller told Madeline, but her daughter, Janelle, recalled that it involved legal trouble. After the call, Madeline had a neighbour drive her to her local bank, where she told them she had to withdraw thousands of dollars — practically all her savings — to invest in her son's new business.
It was a lie the person on the phone had told her to tell.
The call was a scam — perpetrated, according to police and court documents, by a network of scammers operating out of Montreal.
CBC recently published a story identifying the men suspected of being behind the scam. The network that targeted Madeline allegedly called thousands of other seniors between 2019 and March 2021, when police arrested its alleged members.
But it is just one of several high-profile grandparent scam networks operating out of Montreal, according to police, at least two of which bore highly similar characteristics to one another and targeted primarily American seniors.
Targeting the vulnerable
These scams are seemingly lucrative for the scammers. For years, the network that allegedly targeted Madeline lived lives of luxury. The alleged leader of the group, David Anthony Di Rienzo, owned multiple cars, including four Mercedes and a Rolls-Royce Phantom — a nearly $600,000 car, according to a list of proposed admissions filed by the Crown that details some of the evidence against him.
Meanwhile, the scammers allegedly drained the savings of seniors like Madeline, and, even in cases where the fraud was thwarted, left their victims feeling vulnerable and exposed.
"It was very scary for her," Janelle said of her mother.
CBC has agreed to only use her and her mother's first names because Janelle fears reprisals from speaking out against a group of alleged criminals.
Madeline, who was in her 80s, died about a year after the scammers targeted her. She was kind to the end, her daughter said. When her health deteriorated and she had to live in an assisted living facility, she would still offer up her blanket to any visitor who seemed cold.
But the scammers used her kindness against her. Madeline was truthful by nature and, though she had heard of — and even been targeted by — similar scams, she couldn't imagine that someone would lie to her and try to steal from her in such a way.
"She was someone who had always followed the letter of the law," Janelle said. "I think it doesn't ever occur to most of us to take advantage of someone or to lie or to scam them."
'You took their peace of mind,' judge says
Though Janelle could not recall the details of the scammers' call with her mother, the scammers tended to have a script that they followed to get money out of their victims. The script played on their emotions.
In the transcript of one call, filed in an Ontario court as part of a guilty plea, Giordano De Luca, a scammer who was part of a prolific network of grandparent fraud that also operated out of Montreal up until last year, told one of his victims multiple times that he loved her and leveraged her trust to get her to send money on the pretext that it was for bail.
"I know I could trust you; that's why I called you," De Luca told the victim, an 86-year-old who thought she was talking to her grandchild.
In this particular instance, staff at the bank stopped the fraud, but the summary of the facts of the case attached to De Luca's guilty plea says he, and his accomplices, "emotionally manipulated, abused and intimidated" the 86-year old.
They employed "urgency and isolation from the victim's family, to leverage her love and the concern she had for her grandson's well-being and safety, resulting in great stress and a potentially significant financial loss."
The group De Luca was allegedly part of collected more than $1 million from unsuspecting seniors in Canada between 2022 and January 2024.
But the scams' impact on victims extend beyond financial loss.
Jane Magnus-Stinson, an American judge sentencing Darlens Renard, one of the men accused of being responsible for collecting money from victims on behalf of Di Rienzo's alleged grandparent scam network, put it this way:
"What you all took from these people was so much more than money," she said in a sentencing hearing, according to court recordings. "You took their peace of mind. For many of them, you took their retirement savings and their ability to live out their final years in peace. You also brought shame to them because they were ashamed of having been fooled.
"They were victims, and they shouldn't be ashamed of loving their grandchildren or their niece or whoever your people claimed was the victim of this crime. But it has caused a pretty devastating psychological harm to them for the end of their lives."
Magnus-Stinson sentenced Renard to six and a half years in prison.
'It breaks my heart'
In the end, as Madeline, the nurse, was sending $28,000 US to the scammers via a courier service, someone at a sorting centre noticed the large bundle of cash and raised a red flag.
The scam was thwarted, but she felt embarrassed and angry. She initially asked her daughter, Janelle, not to tell her other children about the scam.
A year or so after the scam, Madeline, who lived alone and whose only income came from a small pension and social security payments, had to move into an assisted living centre and paid for it using the money the scammers nearly took from her.
"It breaks my heart to know that these things happen," Janelle said," and they happen to people who are trusting. And it devastates people when you see the amounts of money and how this impacts their lives. Even on an emotional level and psychological level, this shook her up."
Madeline died in 2022. Her obituary notes that she was caring and her children and her grandchildren were among the most cherished things in her life.
Janelle said she will testify in the case of the men accused of scamming her mother if she is asked to. They may go to trial later this year.
"Anybody who needed anything — she would help," Janelle said. "I know this is what she would want."
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