The Békéscsaba District Court in south-eastern Hungary has sentenced the five members of a Slovak criminal gang for multiple counts of robbery and theft, the Békés County Chief Prosecutor’s Office said on Friday.
The gang, consisting of four men and one woman, broke into some 50 different facilities, mainly retirement homes and nursing homes, between spring and autumn of 2017, the prosecutor’s office said in a statement.
The gang’s leader was sentenced to 4 years in prison. The other three men were sentenced to 40 months, 34 months and 28 months, respectively. All of them were expelled from Hungary for six years and banned from participating in public affairs also for six years. The gang’s woman member was given a two-year sentence suspended for five years.
The group had been charged with 84 counts of robbery and 273 counts of theft.
The gang’s leader is believed to have picked out their targets online, after which the gang travelled to Hungary to carry out the crimes.
They broke into social care facilities all over the country, often making off with hundreds of thousands, and at times millions of forints in cash.
Three of the gang’s members were arrested in November last year in Komárom, in northern Hungary. The other two were caught in Slovakia under a European arrest warrant and were later handed over to the Hungarian authorities.
Picking on aged people should be a serious crime. A public flogging then hang them.