Maltese Son Impersonates Mum’s Scammer to Save Her Life Savings: The Island’s New Elder-Fraud Vigilantes

‘I’m Impersonating My Mother’s Scammer to Save Her’: How One Maltese Son Turned the Tables on Fraudsters Targeting Malta’s Elderly
By Hot Malta Staff | 09 June 2025, 07:30 CEST

Valletta – When 34-year-old Miguel* from Żejtun answered a WhatsApp call last March, he expected another routine check-in with his 72-year-old mother, Carmen. Instead, he heard a trembling voice whisper: “They say I’ll lose the house if I don’t pay the fine.”
On the other end of the line was a man claiming to be “Inspector Borg” from the Financial Intelligence Analysis Unit, insisting Carmen had laundered €45,000 through her BOV account and must convert the sum into Bitcoin “immediately to clear her name”.
Miguel, a digital-marketing manager, knew the script. Over the previous six months, scam calls to Maltese landlines had jumped 280 %, according to MaltaPolice cyber-crime statistics, with 68 % of victims over 65. Rather than simply warn his mother, Miguel did something unprecedented: he hijacked the scammer’s own playbook.

“I created a fake profile using the scammer’s photo—yes, the one he’d sent Mum on Viber—and I started messaging him as ‘Inspector Borg’ too,” Miguel tells Hot Malta, pulling up two phones on a café table in Strait Street. “I told him the ‘Ministry of Blockchain’ needed an urgent €5,000 clearance fee or his ‘operation’ would be frozen. I even spoke in that hybrid English-Maltese they use to sound official.”
Within 48 hours, the fraudster—believing he was communicating with a corrupt superior—revealed his real Revolut tag, a Bulgarian IBAN and a list of 43 other Maltese pensioners he was grooming. Miguel screen-recorded everything, walked into the Valletta police HQ, and handed over a 22-minute video dossier.
Last week, officers from the Economic Crimes Unit arrested a 27-year-old Romanian national at the airport ferry terminal; he now faces extradition and 14 counts of aggravated fraud. But Miguel’s vigilante sting has ignited something bigger: a national conversation about shame, family duty and the digital literacy gap inside Malta’s tight-knit villages.

“Fil-gażżien ma jitkellimx” (the victim never speaks) is a Maltese proverb that, until now, kept many elderly scam cases out of the statistics. “Older people fear losing face in front of their children, let alone in the parish,” explains Dr. Graziella Attard Previ, a gerontologist at the University of Malta. “They grew up under British administration where the policeman’s word was gospel. When someone in uniform— even a fake one—gives orders, they obey.”
That cultural deference is gold for trans-national scam syndicates who, police say, rotate through Malta every carnival and festa season when cash-heavy pensioners withdraw bundles of €50 notes for donations and street-side tombola. “We sequester burner phones wrapped in lace tablecloths,” one officer laughs grimly. “They know our traditions better than we do.”

Miguel’s reverse-impersonation tactic has now been formalised into a community project called “Żejtun Fakes Back”. Volunteers—many of them gamers and IT students—stage fake personas, waste scammers’ time, and feed actionable data to the police cyber-crime unit. In its first month, the group diverted an estimated €120,000 away from criminal wallets.
But the initiative also raises ethical eyebrows. “We’re not vigilantes; we’re baiters,” Miguel insists. “We never ask for money, we just mirror their language until they slip.”
Attorney General lawyers confirm that entrapment laws focus on inducement to commit a crime, not on continuing an offence already underway, giving the project a grey-zone green light for now.

Across the harbour in Birgu, 78-year-old Francesca is learning to spot deep-fake voices at a free evening class run by the parish confraternity. “They cloned my nephew’s cry for help—said he’d crashed the dghajsa and needed €3,000,” she shudders. “Now I know to hang up and call the church bell-tower first. If the bells are ringing, he’s safe at vespers.”
Such hyper-local verification hacks—what Miguel calls “digital folk wisdom”—are spreading faster than any government leaflet. Even festa posters carry a QR code that, when scanned, plays a recording of the local archpriest warning: “The only inspector who asks for Bitcoin is the devil.”

Finance Minister Clyde Caruana told parliament last week that Malta will pilot a “Scam Safe” label for banks and mobile providers that meet new elder-fraud benchmarks, including mandatory two-hour cooling-off periods on large crypto transfers. Meanwhile, BOV has introduced voice-biometric checks for customers over 70 who initiate outbound calls to numbers not saved in their contacts.

Yet the most powerful safeguard may be the simplest: talking. Miguel still meets his mother every Sunday after mass for coffee and a pastizz, but now they also scroll through suspicious numbers together. “She’s my partner in crime-fighting,” he smiles. “The scammers wanted to isolate her; instead we turned the whole village into a neighbourhood watch group chat.”

As festival season peaks and band marches echo through narrow alleys, Malta’s elderly are discovering that the same collective spirit that once defended the shoreline from corsairs can now shield their life savings from digital pirates. The battle is far from over, but for the first time the scammers are the ones looking over their shoulders—wondering if the “gullible” nanna on the other end of the line is actually a 34-year-old gamer from Żejtun with a recorder app and a very Maltese sense of justice.

*Name changed to protect ongoing investigations.