HOUSTON – Police are on the lookout for a gang of con-artists who’ve been targeting elderly women near Westheimer and Dunvale.
On March 11, the group of suspects approached an elderly woman who’d just left the Walmart and was looking for her car.
The suspects offered to help her, and then offered to drive the car to her so she wouldn’t have to walk.
The victim said she handed them her keys, but when they pulled up in the car, something was wrong.
"They had done something to the car pretty fast," the victim, who KHOU 11 will call "Jane," said. "The car, it would go ‘thump, thump."
The men convinced Jane, a 77-year-old widow, that her car needed to be fixed and told her they’d drive her to a repair shop in their vehicle—a white, four-door Ford Explorer.
But first, the suspect said they needed to make a stop.
"They made me go to the bank and get money to take care of ‘fixing the car,’" she said.
Jane withdrew $10,000 from her account and gave the suspects $8,000 in cash.
Afterward, the suspects drove Jane to the Plaza Americas shopping center in southwest Houston and made her purchase more than $14,000 worth of jewelry with her credit card.
"They ran up some exorbitant watches," Jane said.
Police said the suspects finally dropped the victim off at a PetSmart store at Westheimer and Dunvale and left her there.
HPD Major Offenders Det. Michael Ybanez described the gang of suspects as "very scary, convincing, forceful and coercive."
Ybanez believes the con artists may be a family, but they’re "very mobile" and live like gypsies. One of the men called a woman "mom" during Jane’s con.
Ybanez said the suspects go from apartment to apartment or low-income housing every few days, and they may also travel from state to state.
In a second case that happened in May, Ybanez said apparently the same group of suspects used a 9-year-old "as an excuse to get into the victim’s apartment and use the restroom."
Ybanez said that victim also believed that she had car trouble and was paying the suspects for repairs when she was distracted and her jewelry was stolen.
Jane said the suspects told her that she "could get killed in [her] car" if she didn’t get it fixed.
"As time when on, I thought maybe they meant killing me in this car," she recalled.
HPD is asking anyone with information on the suspects in this case to call Crime Stoppers at 713-222-TIPS or HPD at 713-308-3100.
