They had the script studied to perfection. The first step was to choose the victim: it always had to be an older woman who walked alone through the city of Buenos Aires, especially through the streets. Recoleta, Belgrano, Palermo either Park Village. Once they “had their target in their sights,” the scammers began their staging: making the unsuspecting woman believe that they had a winning Lottery or Quini 6 ticket, arguing that they were illiterate and that they needed help, either to collect the prize or to escape from a man who was following them to take it from them. Thus, they managed to convince them to allow them to enter their homes, where later, under deception, they stole their savings and jewelry.
This is how a gang of criminals acted that between January 2023 and February of this year He obtained a loot of 386,000 dollars, 4,690,000 pesos and 5,050 euros. They accuse her of having been involved in at least 16 cases of scams.
An investigation of national criminal and correctional judge Martín Yadarolawith the collaboration of detectives from a brigade from the Community Investigations Division 3 of the City Police, managed to identify three of the scammers.
“In some cases, the female scammers reported not having documentation to collect and to do so they offered the victim to collect the ticket or keep it in custody. Meanwhile, the other rummaged in search of money or jewelry. An accomplice stayed at just the right distance to act, if necessary. There were cases in which the criminals used drugs to confuse the victims,” reported the Buenos Aires Ministry of Security in a press release where it gave details of the disruption of the so-called Quini Band.
The Secretariat of Criminal Investigations (SIPE), which depends on the Prosecutor’s Unit Specialized in Complex Criminal Investigation (Ufecri), in charge of the prosecutor José María Campagnoli.
SIPE officials analyzed the images from the security cameras that recorded the sequence of how the gang intercepted the victims on the street.
One of the cases analyzed occurred last September when the criminals made off with a loot of five gold rings, a gold chain, 8,600 dollars and 1,370,000 pesos.
Two of the suspects have already been arrested and processed with preventive detention: they are Miriam Ramos Galindo and Manuel Castro Galindo, both of Peruvian nationality and relatives. A third member of the gang, identified as Fanny Castro Galindo, is a fugitive, according to what was reported to THE NATION qualified judicial and police sources.
“As it could be reconstructed, the crimes committed in the aforementioned associative framework were fundamentally linked to the illegitimate dispossession of valuable belongings and cash (generally, savings in national and foreign currency) that the occasional victims kept in their homes, all through maneuvers through a confiscation modality of similar tenor. In principle, Miriam Ramos Galindo, Víctor Hugo Castro Galindo and another woman (possibly Fanny Castro Galindo) were established in different neighborhoods of this city that traveled on foot in an attempt to locate a potential victim with special characteristics (in general: women belonging to the elderly age range who were on public roads without company). of a lottery ticket, claiming that a lawyer had deceived them or that they had to return to their country of origin urgently, among the most common),” Judge Yadarola explained in the indictment.
Afterwards, the suspects “started a conversation until they reached a certain degree of trust in the victim, who at some point was convinced to access their home for some purpose (for example: to safeguard a supposed lottery ticket or cover some urgent need),” the judge explained.
Yadarola specified that “once inside the home, the operation consisted of finding out the places where money or valuable items could be found and, after distracting the potential victim (which in some cases could have included the surreptitious placement of sleeping or narcotic substances to reduce the victim’s attention span), they carried out the dispossession of such things without her realizing it, then leaving the property.”
According to the stories of the different victims identified up to now, “the aforementioned modus operandi It would fluctuate depending on the reaction or early suspicion of the victims, verifying that on certain occasions those in charge of carrying out the maneuver waited at the door of the victims’ property waiting for the moment to enter; On other occasions they have exerted force on things or even some degree of violence on women to carry out the act.”
The detained suspect and the fugitive accused always had the collaboration of Castro Galindo, according to the judicial file.
For example, the scammers stole $80,000 and 70,000 pesos from one of the victims. Juana CC was intercepted when she was walking through Anchorena and Arenales, in Recoleta. One of the suspects told him that she had a winning lottery ticket, but needed help because a man wanted to “take” the cardboard.
Without suspecting anything and to help her, Juana CC made her enter her apartment, located a few blocks away. When they were about to enter the building, a second woman joined them.
“Once in the apartment, the women made different requests (glasses of water or entering the bathroom), at which point the victim lost sight of them. After a while, they left the house, at which time the victim noticed the absence of the aforementioned sums that were on a kitchen table,” said Judge Yadarola when describing the events.
As said, the scams were repeated with the same modus operandi: the fake winning lottery ticket. The suspects even told the victims that they had won 500 million pesos and that they needed help to collect the prize because they were illiterate.
During the investigation, Judge Yadarola was able to determine that without having any activity registered with the Customs Collection and Control Agency (ARCA), Miriam Ramos Galindo had a flow of money transfers in a virtual wallet “whose total amounts escalate to high figures.”
“In effect, from the arithmetic sum of the transfers that entered its financial system, it is noted that, at least in the first two months and 15 days of 2026, it had $7,512,000 in liquid currencies. And with respect to the total of the movements registered in the virtual wallet, which begin in the year 2023, the circulation of the approximate total sum of $40,500,000 was recorded. To this, it must be added that, when the home search was carried out in Beccar, San Isidro, 6,573,000 pesos, 590 Peruvian soles and 98 US dollars in cash were seized, not counting the various technological devices,” Judge Yadarola explained in the resolution.
