The Cuban Ministry of the Interior (Minint) is investigating at least 126 people – all arrested in 2022 – for violent robbery after posing as currency sellers in the informal market, official media reported this Friday.
The defendants deceived people interested in buying dollars through profiles on social networks and, once they saw the interested party, they stole “large sums of national currency,” according to a note from the Ministry of Finance. spread by Granma newspaper.
“(The victims) are assaulted and intercepted by individuals who, using physical force and in some cases white weapons or fire, threaten them with a high level of violence, even physically assaulting them, and steal all the money they they were carrying to make the false change”, explains the information from the agency.
Virtual deception, the real hit and long years in prison. In 2022, 126 defendants (67 in Provisional Prison) were arrested for robberies with violence and scams using digital networks for informal settlement of currency purchases and sales. https://t.co/96pB5cFZMR pic.twitter.com/xUpgAZCuvk
— MININT_CUBA (@minint_cuba) February 16, 2023
In Havana alone, a total of 120 people were arrested in 2022 for this type of crime and 12 criminal groups with up to 12 members were dismantled, according to the Cuban government. In addition, 67 people are in pretrial detention.
According to information from Granma, “the loss of human life as a consequence of these events has not had to be regretted, people have been seriously injured by the extreme violence used by these criminals.”
At the end of last January, transcended an attempted fraud in the Eduardo Chibás neighborhood, in the Guanabacoa municipality of the capital, where two individuals were arrested after executing a violent robbery in which they used firearms during an illegal currency sale operation.
The sellers of dollars stole from their victims the sum of 880,000 Cuban pesos (Cup), clothes and a bag, in addition to firing into the air with firearms.
According to the Cuban authorities, the thieves were arrested, the weapons used in the assault were recovered and the money of the victims was also seized, who did not suffer physical injuries.
In Cuba, the informal currency market is widespread and its presence gained strength after the 2021 monetary reform, which ended the convertible peso (CUC), a currency whose value was linked to that of the dollar.
Since then, the exchange rate in the informal market -currently around 170 Cuban pesos (CUP) per green bill- has skyrocketed and in 2022 reached 200 pesos per dollar at a time of maximum demand due to the growing migratory flow.
In an attempt to counteract this trend, the government launched a currency exchange market with a rate of 123 CUP per dollar. However, this has not displaced the presence of currency exchanges on the street.
With information from EFE
