SHARE
COPY LINK

SEX

Copycat tries to blackmail BMW heiress again

A man tried to blackmail BMW heiress Susanne Klatten out of €75,000 with an alleged sex video just two months after her former lover was jailed for doing the same thing, daily Bild reported Saturday.

Copycat tries to blackmail BMW heiress again
Photo: DPA

Munich prosecutor Anton Winkler told the newspaper that investigators had arrested a suspect.

The latest attempt had nothing to do Swiss gigolo Helg Sgarbi, who was convicted of blackmail in March and sentenced to six years in prison after talking Klatten out of €7 million. Most of the money has not yet been recovered.

The man reportedly contacted Klatten and said he had sex videos showing her in “dangerous” situations.

The suspect however, had neither sex videos nor any relationship to Klatten, Winkler said.

Sgarbi’s lawyer, Egon Geis, said his client, “knew nothing up until now about this copycat artist.”

Klatten, 46, is the daughter of the late Herbert Quandt, the German industrialist who saved BMW from collapse in 1957 and built the Bavarian carmaker into a world auto power.

Sgarbi was arrested last fall after demanding hundreds of millions of euros from Klatten in order to keep their affair secret. With an Italian co-conspirator, Sgarbi filmed his encounters with the married mother-of-three.

Member comments

Log in here to leave a comment.
Become a Member to leave a comment.

CRIME

German police swoop on gang of foreign dating scammers

German police said Wednesday they had arrested 11 suspected members of a Nigerian mafia group behind a large-scale dating scam.

German police swoop on gang of foreign dating scammers

The Black Axe gang was involved internationally in “multiple areas of criminal activity”, with a focus in Germany on romance scams and money-laundering, Bavarian police said in a statement.

The dating trick was a “modern form of marriage fraud”, police said.

“Using false identities, the fraudsters for example signalled their intention to marry and in the course of further contact repeatedly demand money under various pretexts,” police said.

The money was subsequently transferred to Black Axe in Nigeria “via financial agents”, authorities said.

In the process, the gang used a “commodity-based money laundering” scheme where products, often with a seeming “charitable purpose” were bought and delivered to Nigeria.

Some 450 cases of romance scamming had been reported in the region of Bavaria in 2023 alone, with the damages rising to 5.3 million euros ($5.7 million), police said.

The suspects, who all held Nigerian citizenship and were aged between 29 and 53, were arrested in nationwide raids on Tuesday.

Law enforcement swooped on 19 properties, including both homes and asylum shelters, police said.

The Black Axe gang had “strict hierarchical structures under leadership in Nigeria” operating different territorial units, police said.

The group had a “significant influence” on politics and public administrations, in particular in Nigeria.

Globally, the gang’s main areas of operation were “human-trafficking, fraud, money-laundering, prostitution and drug-trafficking”.

Black Axe operated under the cover of the Neo Black Movement of Africa, an ostensibly charitable organisation used as “camouflage” for the gang’s structures.

The action against Black Axe was the first of its kind in Germany, police said.

SHOW COMMENTS