In the very similar cases, two women received large amounts of money from the accounts of other women, and transferred the sums to accounts held abroad.
Two district courts in different parts of Finland have handled very similar cases over the past week, where the victims of so-called ‘love scams’ have faced money laundering charges.
In both cases, the defendants accepted and forwarded large sums of money within a very short period of time.
On Monday, Päijät-Häme District Court sentenced a 68-year-old woman to a suspended three month prison sentence for negligent money laundering.
The defendant in this case met a man — who identified himself as Colin Allen Am — via the dating app Tinder in spring 2019. According to her own account, the woman tried to help the man by agreeing to receive a package, paying customs duties and transferring money.
The man gave instructions, which the woman followed.
This led to her receiving money from another Finnish woman’s account, which the man explained was the payment of a loan he had received.
The sum — totalling nearly 52,000 euros — was transferred to the woman’s account via four different bank transfers, all in the name of the same Finnish woman. The defendant then transferred each of the payments from her own account onto Romanian and German bank accounts. She also kept about 200 euros from the money that passed through her account.
The prosecutor in the case told the court that the funds were the product of…
