A man blew the cover on his elaborate pension fraud when he was dressed up as his mother to renew her ID – leading police to find her mummified remains in his basement.
The 57-year-old had been successfully collecting his mother’s pension every month for three years after her death, according to Corriere della Sera.
He kept her body in the cellar of her home, in the commune of Borgo Virgilio in Lombardy, Italy, without reporting her death.
But he was forced to get into his mother’s clothes when her identity card expired.
The son showed up at the commune’s registry office wearing a woman’s dress, wig, lipstick and jewellery to try to fool civil servants.
Officials immediately became suspicious and began their own investigations into the case, uncovering what they suspected was years of fraud using the identity of a woman who could not be tracked down.
The village’s mayor, Francesco Aporti, told Corriere della Sera: ‘The employee shared her doubts with us, and the local police, who were conducting their own investigation, got to work.
‘They isolated the images from the surveillance cameras and saw that the woman had arrived by car.
‘Alarm: the lady doesn’t have a driver’s licence. Then they carried out further investigations, and, piece by piece, the picture of this troubling story began to emerge.’
They then asked the ‘mum’ to return to the office, where police officers and the mayor were waiting for him.
Mr Aporti added: ‘He entered the municipal offices at a slow pace, he was wearing a suit with a long skirt, he had lipstick on his lips, nail polish on his hands, jewellery on his neck and hands, old style earrings, dark brown hair.
‘But that neck, on closer inspection, was a little too big, and the wrinkles were also strange, the skin of the hands did not look like the one of the 85-year-old he said he was.
‘And the voice, feminine yes but every now and then he missed some male notes.’
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He confessed to being the son and allowed officers to search his mother’s home, where they found a mummified body in one room.
Initial investigations suggest she died of natural causes in 2022 and her body was taken to the mortuary for examination.
The son could is now the subject of further investigations and could face charges of concealment of a corpse and fraud.
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