Germany is looking down the shaky and forgetful barrel of a new era of crime. The citizens of that fair nation live in the terrifying shadow of a recent explosion (read "two known cases") of what the ever-quick-to-dub media has dubbed "silver crime."What, pray tell, is "silver crime." We turn to the Time UK Online for a little enlightenment:
A group of well-to-do pensioners who lost their savings in the credit crunch staged an arthritic revenge attack and held their terrified financial adviser to ransom, prosecutors said yesterday.
The alleged kidnapping is the latest example of what is being dubbed “silver crime” — the violent backlash of pensioners who feel cheated by the world.
“As I was letting myself into my front door I was assaulted from behind and hit hard,” the financial adviser James Amburn, a 56-year-old German-American, said. “Then they bound me with masking tape until I looked like a mummy. I thought I was a dead man.”
He was freed by 40 heavily armed policemen from the counter-terrorist unit last Saturday. The frightened consultant was in his underwear, his body lacerated by wounds allegedly inflicted by angry pensioners.
The group of "impoverished" pensioners included two couples that lost a sack of Euros in the American housing market. The first couple used the cellar in the vacation home to hold the financial advisor hostage. The second couple, a pair of retired doctors, supervised the abuse. The frightening, if fragile-hipped, foursome hoped that they could beat the financial advisor into giving back all the money they lost.
The financial advisor almost escaped when, after stripping him down to his skivvies beating him badly enough of break a rib, the four amateur torturers allowed their victim a backyard smoke break.
"Oh, God! Please don't kill me! And, um, can I smoke in here?"
"In the house. Ah, no."
"Then, if you're not beating me right this moment, could I step out and have a quick smoke."
"Of course, my dear man. We're Germans, not savages. Besides, the wife's missing her stories. We can pick this up in thirty. That work for you?"
The financial advisor made it over the vacation house's back wall – the cash-strapped pensioners were so poor that they couldn't even build a decent backyard wall for their vacation house – and went running in his tightie-whities for help. However, the pensioners gave wheezy chase to the fugitive financier, shouting that he was a thief. (Having stolen, apparently, several bruises, cuts, and a single pair of briefs.) A "helpful" group of young men subdued the nearly naked "burglar" and, as you do, handed him over to the two old couples chasing him. The police, presumably, would have better things to do than investigate a robbery.
For attempting to escape, the financier was beaten again.
Convinced that they'd finally broken the suit's will to resist, the elderly couples had the advisor fax a request for funds to a Swiss bank. The advisors fax contained a coded message that played on the fact that the German word for a financial policy is spelled like the English word for "police." His captors did not notice the call for help and, a short time later, the counter-terror unit arrived.
Comic cred goes to Dinosaur Comics.
4 comments:
I wonder if this will be the plot for Hostel 3.
Screamin' Shon,
I can see it now. The members of the Elite Hunt Club find their vast fortunes destroyed in the downturn and trn their minds towards revenge. That could work.
as hilarious as it is to laugh at people defrauded by these scumwad bankers, unnoticed amid the laughter is that the hostage did indeed have an unnumbered account in a foreign country and in fact is indeed a fraud perpetrating bastard (he didn't lose his money, notice, justh is clients'), who got off lightly.
Gamesman,
If by "unnoticed" you mean "I made this up," then you are correct. The hostage in fact had no "unnumbered account" - in fact, such things have not been allowed since the Swiss finally criminalized money laundering in the 1990s - but rather the hostage had merely made the claim that he had made trades with a Swiss bank and had funds there he could tap in order to convince his captors to allow him to send off a fax.
There was no money at the Swiss bank - just the police.
Interestingly, German authorities have since revealed that the money the torturers gave the hostage to invest was "black money" that had not been declared for tax purposes. Even prior to kidnapping, the torturers had been criminals.
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