A rich, elderly widow was leaving a Brazilian bank in January 2020 when a psychic approached with a terrible prophecy.
To prove it, the fortune teller had the widow participate in a divination game involving cowrie shells, then took her to two more seers who spoke of freeing her daughter from the “bad spirit” that would soon plague her, Brazilian newspaperThe widow, Geneviève Boghici, grew skeptical when the psychics charged her the Brazilian equivalent of nearly $1 million for their soothsaying services, and she turned to her daughter for advice, according toOver the next two weeks, the 82-year-old...
On Wednesday, Rio de Janeiro police assigned to working cases of elderly abuse arrested four members of the gang that preyed on Boghici, police said in a statement. According to Reuters, those in custody included the daughter, and they face charges of embezzlement, robbery, extortion, false imprisonment and criminal association.
After hooking her mother, Sabine and her accomplices allegedly spent months maintaining the con to bilk the woman out of money, jewelry and artwork. In one part of the charade, Sabine and an accomplice masquerading as a psychic “began to take the artwork from the [mother’s] house, claiming that the painting was cursed with something negative, with negative energy that needed to be prayed over,” Rio de Janeiro police officer Gilberto Ribeiro told Reuters.
Sabine then allegedly fired her mother’s domestic workers so her accomplices could enter the home and take the artwork unimpeded, the Associated Press reported. When, at one point, her mother refused to keep making cash payments, Sabine allegedly took away her cellphone, stopped feeding her and threatened her with a knife, according to Correio Braziliense.
Over the course of the scam, the suspects are accused of stealing 16 pieces of art, including museum-quality paintings from Brazilian masters Tarsila do Amaral and Emiliano Di Cavalcanti, according to the AP. Three of the stolen works —
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