In his absence, the Debrecen District Court sentenced the 36-year-old defendant, who insidiously stole hundreds of thousands of forints from his neighbor, to 2 years in prison. The man with a history of multiple convictions was found guilty by a court on January 19, 2021, of committing fraud.
According to the facts established by the court, in January 2018, the victim asked her neighbor to set up her computer. The man from Balmazújváros thus learned that the woman was in contact with a foreign man on an internet social media site who asked the victim to transfer $ 1,300 to him they were in a long-distance relationship.
The defendant decided to mislead his neighbor by pretending to be this foreign man on the known social media site for unjust gain. The 36-year-old man therefore, without the victim’s knowledge, blocked the foreign man’s profile and then created a fake profile with the same username, through which he contacted the neighbor.
The victim unsuspectingly continued her intimate correspondence with the “foreign man” who was actually her neighbor. In order for this fake foreign man to travel to her between January 2018 and April 2018, she sent over a total of more than 600,000 forints in cash to the neighbor 5-6 times so that the defendant would pass it on to the foreign man, as the woman believed that the two men know each other in reality.
Judge Dr. Zsolt Hornyák said during the reasoning of the verdict that the defendant was not cooperative at all during the proceedings, he did not appear for several subpoenas. Because of this, the court first imposed a fine on the man and then issued a national arrest warrant against him. In addition, the repeatedly convicted man claimed throughout that he would compensate the victim, which, however, did not happen. It was an aggravating circumstance that the defendant committed the crime during the probation period of several suspended sentences.
The court’s verdict was not final, and the prosecutor and defendant’s counsel had three working days to file a statement of appeal.
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