A young man was threatened with a knife and forced to withdraw money from an ATM to give it to two robbers. The brazen crime, resembling the so-called Brazilian kidnapping that took place in Sofia on 23 October.
At that moment, the 24-year-old resident of Sofia was returning to his block in the “Lyulin” housing estate, after going to the cigarette shop. There, two teenagers saw that there were 100 BGN bills in the wallet. So they decided to rob him. They followed him for a hundred meters and attacked him in a less lighted place. They even pulled out a knife.
One threatened the man who would stab him if he didn’t give him the money, and the other held him by the neck. He took 300 BGN from him, as well as the gold chain and the watch. However, he saw that the man also had a credit card. So they decided to get him to withdraw her money from her.
They put the knife in his back and forced him to withdraw his entire 140 BGN balance from the nearby ATM. This didn’t get along well with the teenagers, who knew they couldn’t pick up the man’s phone because they would be easily caught.
Instead, they also figured out how to make money out of it. You took the man to a pawnshop. There was only one counter through which the object was distributed. So, still with a knife in his back, the young man put the phone down without being able to tell the staff that he was threatened. He received BGN 80 for the device, which he immediately gave to the two boys. After taking this money, they hit the man and ran away.
The robbed denounced the carabinieri and the boys were promptly captured. Camera recordings from the shop where they targeted their victim helped a lot. They had filmed their faces quite clearly, the man immediately recognized his attackers. The police arrested them hours later. It turned out that they are minors – 17 and 15 years old. The eldest already has a previous conviction for robbery. He robbed a woman at the Dobrich market. Again with her knife he forced her to give him her purse. And then they caught him. He received a 10-month sentence suspended with 3 years of probation. It was not over when he attacked the young man, and if he is convicted in the new case, he will serve that sentence too. The prosecutor held the two minors for a maximum of 72 hours and will ask for their definitive arrest.
What they did resembles a Brazilian kidnapping. The expression became popular in the nineties of the last century. It is a threat to a foreign tourist with a knife. It is usually done a few minutes before midnight. Several people surround the man and force him to withdraw the maximum amount allowed for the day from his credit card. When midnight strikes in a few minutes, they wait. When the arrows hit 12, the procedure is repeated. So in 10 minutes they took a total of $ 800. The Brazilian police have called the cases “12 without 5 to 12 and 5” because of the hours in which these robberies took place. With the ever-improving quality of the cameras, such robberies are now rare, but at the turn of the century, when they were at their peak, there were days with more than 10 such crimes. Now, however, albeit on a much smaller scale, masked people are convincing people to transfer money to them online.
