An elderly man has been reunited with his small fortune after falling victim to an elaborate international scam.
The dramatic series of events unfolded after the man came into Gore Police Station "speaking in code" and talking about corruption between local police and a Gore bank, police said.
Sergeant Eric Browne realised something was wrong when the man asked him to check a police ID number that he had been given over the phone by a person pretending to be a cop.
The pensioner told Browne he had received a phone call from a person claiming to be an overseas-based detective investigating counterfeit currency being produced by the man’s bank.
The fake detective asked the man to read the serial numbers of some cash he had over the phone, then told him they were counterfeit.
He told the man to withdraw an amount of cash, place the bills within the pages of books, then courier them to a London address so investigators would have a good sample to check for counterfeiting.
"Alarm bells were well and truly going off in my mind at this point," Browne said. "When he told me he had withdrawn $20,000, I knew we had a significant scam on our hands."
Time was of the essence for Browne to stop the scam in its tracks, as the man had packaged up two novels with notes slipped between the pages and couriered them the previous day.
"We had to act fast, so I immediately got his tracking number, saw that it would be going out through Auckland International Airport, and reached out to the International Mail Centre there," Browne said.
Cutting through the red tape and bureaucracy of retrieving this package was made easier by an important connection at the International Mail Centre.
"It turns out the boss there was a detective for 30 years, and he assured me he would do all he could to get this package," Browne said. "But it really was going to be a close call to catch it in time."
Browne discovered there were three cargo crates going onto the plane that this package would be on.
"The first two had been loaded on already, and with a last-ditch search in the third crate, this man's package was found right at the very bottom," he said.
"It was like something out of a Hollywood script."
Browne said the package was intercepted just in time and the man will be reunited with his money.
The police investigation into the scam is ongoing.
