The Perfect 5 Star Hotel Con | Conmen Case Files | Real Crime

there is a way to make an entry in my destiny now it was a conspiracy of witches download veli today so the scammers, the most cunning criminals of all, charming, brilliant and calculating, betray trust and devastate lives, but remain a complete enigma , we are about to explore the mysterious. world of these master criminals, providing an unprecedented insight into the workings of the complex minds of some of the world's most cunning con artists, we will reveal the details and intricacies of their elaborate

crime

s and discover how they were dramatically brought to justice in this show. a globe-trotting Colombian whose

crime

s are estimated to have earned him more than a million pounds in the last decade and have seen him named one of the world's most talented confidence fraudsters; a bettencourt is quite possibly the quintessential commando and fully exploring and understanding the quintessential con artists, soft strategy experts, like forensic psychologist Kerry Danes, will offer their own unique analysis to get him into the biggest and best

hotel

s in the world. with completely empty hands and then leave with money, credit cards, jewelry and passports.

He is a con artist and an escape artist. He has a dozen aliases and the kind of charm that can only be described as hypnotic, a criminal so cold that even when he was sent to prison he was able to walk out the front door, having only been in a three-month hospital for two months and a half sentence. year and walked out the door for a dentist appointment and walked on into the world's most exclusive five-

star

hotel

s, glamorous guests experienced the best hospitality on offer, but in this elite environment a con man developed a near-

perfect

attitude . five

star

scam for more than a decade juan carlos guzmán-bettencourt took advantage of these exclusive places his goal was to steal from his richest clients the career of the handsome, charming and affable con man and his

perfect

ly perfected hotel business has been closely followed by Court correspondent Sarah O' Connor always shows up as a guest, can grab a coffee, can change some money and make sure the staff recognizes you.

He becomes a familiar face at the hotel. Well all hotels are pretty small communities once the staff have seen you in a cafe or reception a couple of times they tend to accept you as someone who actually stays there. Most scammers actually want to go unnoticed, but in this

case

Bettencourt took full advantage of making friends, if he so chooses, with the hotel staff. At least he was familiar. to them, he was nearby, he made himself visible so they would think he was a hotel guest, and essentially, by being visible, he became almost anonymous. One man who knows how Bettencourt operates better than most is the Irish police officer or garda officer who tracked him down. after one of his most serious stunts in 2005.

Duty sergeant brian mclin will approach the reception desk or even the bar staff and greet my guest. Can I use his pay phone? Can I use your cigarette machine? Can I use the Internet? but saying I'm a guest gives an immediate impression to the receptionist or staff member. oh yes this is a guest and when he meets them again they are more than convinced but that was simply stage one of the scammer's strategy so while he was getting acquainted with the staff and also trying to find out everything he can about guests, such as their names and room numbers, especially if they appear wealthy.

You know, if you stay at the bar, you will hear customers approaching the counter or even interacting with the bartender at their seats where room numbers and guest names are exchanged. One thing he does that is quite ingenious is that he stands in line at the breakfast signs and listens as the guests give their names and room numbers to the maitre d with the carefully laid foundation bettencourt. He would launch the third and most risky phase of the scam on him. Hello, this is where the legwork pays off because once he is armed with this information, he goes to reception when a member of staff who looks familiar to him and who recognizes him, perhaps that member of staff, is there. has changed money for him and he goes and asks for a key card to a room assuming the name of a guest knowing the identity of the guest of the room knowing that the guest was actually outside the room you would just say I lost my room card or the I have lost, is there any chance you can give me another one?

Juan Bettencourt combined his clever strategy with his hypnotic charm and the result was that the helpful receptionist handed the scammer an access card to a room or suite that in

real

ity he should never have been allowed access to, it is extremely convincing with the hotel staff and has acquired the information very quickly while lounging around the hotel to be able to approach the staff in a very safe way, like the five star culture. hotel industry that the guest is always right and a guest who looks like Bettencourt will never be questioned. The best hotels are a kind of specialized ecosystem for scammers because if you know what you're doing, you can crack the hotel's code. then you can get away with all sorts of things, what makes fancy hotels particularly vulnerable to scammers is that it's all about making the high-end guest feel like they don't need to prove anything to you, doesn't it prove the identity of he?

Do you know who? he is a valued and trusted old customer so it is all about saying yes sir no problem sir whatever you say sir right away sir it is about being very deferential and in that sense he is the ideal territory for the scammer because it's all about trust and all. is the scam the scammer with the third phase of the scam completed bettencourt would casually continue starting the fourth stage of his high class scam now armed with his key card he heads to the hotel where we make sure no one else is inside uses the card , once this man enters the room, he can take his time and go around the entire room and take several different items such as watches, jewelry, ID cards, cash and once he has done all that, he will call security. to the room to open this safe, that's his last move.

The fifth and final stage of the Bettencourt scam would see the world's most illustrious hotels open their guests' safes for the hotel fraudster and ultimately hand over their contents to him. He doesn't call the hotel reception. He brings. hotel security and tells them that he can't get into a safe and that he has lost his PIN number simply due to the fact that he is in the room, which is convincing enough for the security man to say that he is in the room. room it should be for. It's

real

, so I'll open the safe, so it's a pretty clever scam, but again what he's doing is taking advantage of the social economy of the best hotel.

The room itself appears intact and no theft was reported. There are no signs of any theft. Foul play inside the room, so they opened the safe, they leave and he helps himself to whatever is there, be it jewelry, passports, credit cards, cash, he takes it and walks out with them. Bettencourt had devised an almost perfect five-star hotel. hotel scam manipulating the impeccable service offered for his own benefit a scam so perfect that throughout Juan Bettencourt's criminal career he was never caught in the act it is a meticulous plan it is perfect it is plausible in every way it is very common guests lose their key cards forget their combinations he looks good he wears designer clothes a flashy watch his charm personified has been described as hypnotically charming so why would anyone question anything other than being a guest in just over a decade the scammer from the hotel had earned an estimated one million pounds? of the world's most illustrious hotels, but the international con artist's career has spanned far more than a decade.

In 1993, when he was 17, Bettencourt shocked and astonished the world with a death-defying scam that catapulted him to the top. worldwide infamy for a decade, the elegant, smooth and enigmatic. Scammer Juan Carlos Guzmán-Bettencourt made five-star hotels his hunting ground and developed the ultimate strategy to effortlessly infiltrate their best suites and raid their abundant safes, and each time he did so with the unwitting help of the rich. from the five star staff. and those who meet every need leave pretty easy marks because if you look good and talk the talk and walk the walk, they will often accept you without hesitation as one of their own and grant you all kinds of privileges that wouldn't be granted to normal people and you can get away with all kinds of things.

Police estimate that Bettencourt has gotten away with more than a million pounds from the hotels he has expertly robbed, but the five-star good life was a world away from the conman's humble beginnings. To believe in the legend of Bettencourt, one of the stories is that he was born in the Colombian town of Royal Danilo in 1976, that he lived in a mud hut, that his mother was a cleaner and that his father was a farm worker, whether true or no, it's incredibly atmospheric. This child with such an origin managed to deceive five-star hotels extremely effectively. his mother admitted that he was treated badly and that his father had left when he was only a month old and she remarried and felt pushed out, that he didn't fit in, we often find that people who have grown up feeling unloved or have been abandoned children grow up with a pretty iron determination to succeed and not just succeed, but succeed for themselves and on their own terms now clearly bettencourt succeeded in some way he certainly came a long way from the mud hut in colombia but you have to think carefully if We put so much imagination, so much energy and head towards some kind of legal solution and legitimate lifestyle, actually, where would I be now?

The story goes that Bettencourt left home when he was a teenager after a family argument. Legend dictates that after running away from home, the scammer ate out of garbage cans and lived in an abandoned plane with other street children in Kali. airport in Colombia and airplanes and airports would become even more significant in the mythology of Juan Bettencourt 1993 when the scammer was 17 years old he entered the public consciousness for the first time and what an entrance it was, so the first decisive moment for Bettencourt was in In the early hours of June 1, 1993, and it really made an impact, they found him wandering around the Miami airport in the United States.

He appeared disheveled and the story was that he was a stowaway on a plane from Colombia and had not been in the cargo area of ​​the plane. his claim was that he was hidden in the wheel hull of the plane no one knows if the shocking story of the teenage stowaway is true or the first scam in bettencourt's international career this plane flew at 35,000 feet which is 5,000 feet higher than Mount Everest and 40 degrees below zero. Aviation medicine experts say this story is really hard to believe. It seems impossible that a teenager could survive this type of trip, but airport staff have said that some people saw him fall from the wheel hole.

He apparently lay there unconscious for a few minutes before he started to recover and was shaking. The risks he apparently took to leave Colombia really point to the fact that he was someone who had to escape and that he was truly determined to make another life. for himself by any means necessary Bettencourt under the assumed name Guillermo Rosales told the hungry press his fantastic story of escaping poverty and cheating death he claimed he was 13 at the time which we know was a lie it was established that he was 17 years old He also stated that he was an orphan and that he climbed into the wheel hub just before the plane took off and that he was there throughout the flight and said that the image of his dead parents helped him overcome the ordeal from Colombia . to miami the story of the 13-year-old stowaway was a media sensation guillermo rosales really 17-year-old juan bettencourt was entrusted to the guardianship of a miami police officer and his wife but while he was with him the teenager stole jewelry tools and a bicycle He also disappeared with a support fund of 75,000 American citizens created with sympathy for the alleged orphan who had cheated death, however, shortly after Colombian officials cleared up the story about the boy who clung to the wheel from Colombia to Miami , the consulate revealed that this person was not a 13-year-old orphan who was a bet in court that he was 17 years old and that his parents were alive and that he had a criminal record in his native country.

Bettencourt was deported from Miami in 1994 and again in 1995 when he attempted to return but his initial stay in the land of opportunity had been in education and he laid the foundation for his future.Career as a con artist in the late 1990s Juan Bettencourt had perfected his hotel scam. He was never caught in the act when he ran his five-star scam and because he used more than a dozen aliases when police found him, they never caught him. held for a long time in London in 1998 after being arrested at their hotel with police releasing a man they believed was called Gonzalo Zapper Vives. questioned for a series of robberies in exclusive London hotels, he was charged and never went to trial for this because he jumped bail after jumping bail, disappeared and was not heard from for a year, a year later, in 1999, Similarly, a man named Cesar Ortego Zaveras was also released from British custody.

He was arrested at Heathrow Airport because he had used a credit card that had been reported stolen from Japan and assumed the alias César Ortigoza Veras and believed his alias. and was fined 400 pounds and once again walked free from court and was banished. It makes a lot more sense if crimes committed in different jurisdictions have different aliases, because then it's much harder for the police to understand the bigger picture and it makes it much more likely that you'll get away with it, but the aliases worked like a charm because in that At the time, police technology was basic and, therefore, the scammer was able to avoid his true identity by being exposed.

He was very fortunate because in the late 1990s the Metropolitan Police did not have an automated fingerprint search system, so when he was arrested for what was perhaps considered at the time an isolated misdemeanor, his fingerprints They were not taken and compared to pending crimes across the country as they would be now if that system had been in place. The police would have known they were dealing with international fraudster Juan Carlos Guzmán-Bettencourt and two years after his arrest at Heathrow, Bettencourt returned to the British capital in May 2001, he was back in London and really went to town infiltrating exclusive hotels in Mayfair, Knightsbridge and Park Lane and from one of the hotels he is reported to have taken around £40,000 worth of jewellery. and cash and another fifteen thousand pounds bettencourt must feel really excited walking into a hotel empty handed and then walking out with sometimes tens of thousands of pounds maybe that makes him feel like he's somebody because after all he must To be better, he must be smarter than the elite he is robbing, in their eyes he is not just an ordinary thief, the scammer's carefully honed routine resulted in him. leaving london with more than fifty thousand pounds and left the capital in style from one of the hotels, he stole an amex card and hired a bentley with a driver for 400 pounds to take him to the airport where he bought a ticket to paris and also he spent eight thousand pounds on jewelery and designer clothes bettencourt took to the skies with his ill-gotten gains and once again disappeared without consequences bound for paris and his employer continued in 2003 bettencourt was in las vegas he had scammed his way back to the United States undetected ready to rob the hotels lining the strip in August 2003 in Las Vegas, he continues his hotel scam and carries out his most audacious scam yet from two hotels on the main strip of Las Vegas to exclusive hotels.

He stole £200,000 in cash and jewellery. The confidence and self-confidence required to pull off what is essentially a robbery is really amazing because you have to be able to walk into that hotel and say not only verbally if necessary but with all of your body language that I belong here, so I imagine he was very immersed in that role, but it must have been very exciting for him too because it's actually quite complex, it's almost like a promotions scene 11. Las Vegas detectives reported that he stole Rolex watches from the rooms of hotel and distributed this 50,000. Pound monitors the waitresses for good service, but playing the role of the modern Robin Hood was not the only role that Bettencourt adopted.

Bettencourt's mythology is that he tells people that he is the son of a diplomat and also that he is a prince of Colombia, so we can see this in high-level scammers like Betancourt, so on the one hand they desperately aspire to be part of this aspirational lifestyle, but at the same time they despise it because they think these rich people deserve the brands they deserve. They scam you, so you have this strange dichotomy, this dissonance between what you aspire to and at the same time what you despise. After his trip to Las Vegas, Juan Bettencourt returned to London in November 2004.

Due to Bettencourt's many aliases, he always had eluded him when he committed his five-star scam in Britain's capital, but little did he know when he set to work on this occasion that the conman's infamous reputation was so prolific that the Metropolitan Police now knew exactly who he was in 2004. He is back in london and his favorite hunting grounds of kensington and park lane and is said to have stolen £36,000 from a businessman at one of those hotels. Police officers suspected that this was the work of Bettencourt but they did not think he was in the UK at the time they thought he was in Las Vegas or Russia, however something happened on December 20th that proved the police theory I was completely wrong.

An officer recognized Bettencourt as he was walking down the street and after following him arrested him because of the leather jacket Bettencourt was wearing. When he was arrested he was worth two thousand pounds and was stolen from one of the suites of a hotel on Park Lane in London, as was the eight thousand pound watch he was wearing. Bettencourt had no aliases to hide behind and while he was in custody the scammer's past. finally found him where he was staying the police found several fake IDs and they found a russian passport and a spanish passport with his photo and the name david churches vietto that had been stolen from the canary islands the police found thousands of pounds in different currencies in addition to clothes and jewelery he stole from the dorchester hotel bettencourt had everything in his hands in 2001 and in 2004 he accepted 14 charges but pleaded guilty to the theft of £40,000 in 2001 and the theft of £36,000 in 2004.

Now, By anyone's standards that's prolific and by anyone's standards that's a lot of money, but I imagine given his very humble beginnings he must have really felt like he was living a great life, this gave him everything he needed in April 2005, he was 29 years old, Juan Carlos Guzman-Bettencourt was sentenced to three and a half years in prison. The reality was that he would spend much less time behind bars. Betancourt was sentenced to go to Stanford Hill Prison on Sheppy Island, which is a low-security prison, he was only two months into his three-and-a-half-year sentence when he told prison guards he had a dentist appointment in open prisons, it's standard practice for inmates to be able to do those things, so that an appointment was made. and he left in April 2005 Juan Bettencourt left the prison for his appointment with the dentist and, surprisingly, he attended that appointment, but afterwards he did not return to the prison, he simply continued walking, crossed the bridge to the mainland and disappeared in less than Three months into his three and a half year sentence, Bettencourt left Stanford Hill and never returned, simply continuing to walk across the bridge to the mainland, the headline read outlandish double thief scamming his way out of prison, which the con man didn't I knew it was that newspaper headline. would be the key to his eventual downfall, but not before executing one of his most audacious scams to date, this time in Dublin in 2005.

Juan Carlos Guzmán-Bettencourt was one of the world's most infamous fraudsters, traveling the world and stealing in the most illustrious hotels. Justice had caught the Colombian for his scam in a five-star hotel in London, but less than three months after a sentence of three and a half years, Bettencourt swindled him out of prison. He disappeared, no one knew where he was going to appear. Next, but what Most likely it was somewhere where there was an exclusive five star hotel around 30 and what else can you do? He doesn't stay in one place for long. He's a loner, so it's actually quite a tragic story.

They were not so morally wrong Just 10 days after leaving his prison sentence, Bettencourt arrived in Dublin, the capital of Ireland, when in Dublin he was using one of his dozen aliases and this time he claimed to be Alejandro Cuenco, who was 25 years old . old man from Spain with a new identity, new era and new nationality, the 29-year-old Colombian dedicated himself to his five-star hotel, only this time, fresh out of prison, the fugitive had to deviate from his usual scam and place himself in a completely vulnerable position at 9.30 a.m. m. On June 16, 2005, Bettencourt entered a five-star hotel in Dublin city center wearing blue jeans and a T-shirt with the slogan "save water, drink beer" written on it, usually wearing designer clothing. , but this time he was only out of prison for 10 days, he was probably desperate for cash on stage, so he improvised with what he had, his confidence and charm.

When he entered the hotel, he immediately proceeded to the hallway areas and elevator areas, giving the impression that he was a guest at the hotel. At the hotel, heading straight to his room, Bettencourt would traditionally begin his scam by taking his time and making sure he became a familiar face to the hotel staff, so that they would be fooled into believing he was a guest to fool them, but in Dublin he didn't. did. By doing so, he bypassed the safety net stages of his heist and went straight for the kill, risking his scam falling apart at 10:15 a.m. that morning.

We know that Bettencourt had reached the upper floor where he encountered a cleaner coming out of the top. suite that normally cost approximately one thousand euros per night for an American couple. His children and his children's grandmother were staying in the hotel suite and were in the city visiting from Beverly Hills in Los Angeles. Bettencourt had set his sights on the hotel's most expensive suite, but he was taking a big risk; he was relying completely on his hypnotic charm to succeed. His first interaction with the cleaner was to say that he was the brother of the room guest and that he was staying in the hotel suite and that he had forgotten his room key, which he had left inside the suite, and he asked him to leave it. enter the suite, to which she refused.

I'm afraid you can't know that I don't have permission to leave him. guests to the rooms without her asked him to go down to the reception where they would give him a new key as he went off script. The scammer had not managed to enter the suite. However, he had evaded detection even though the cleaner missed him. Bettencourt, the key, there was nothing to arouse suspicion, he was very polite and they engaged in a general conversation that passed during that short space of time, although he gathered some vital information: he discovered that the American family had hired a babysitter for the hotel suite that night and that's why he was able to go to the reception confident and armed with this information.

The conman had potentially acquired the key to succeeding in the next step of his crime, but Bettencourt was playing his riskiest game yet. Bettencourt defiantly went to where he contacted the receptionist, to begin with he spoke to the receptionists in bad English and then asked if he speaks French, to which the receptionist did and they both started a conversation in French where Bettencourt explained that there was lost my room. The key can be replaced and he convinced this person to cut him a new key card and just as he was walking away very confidently, he turns around and says, by the way, are we okay to babysit tonight? ?

Yes, now the receptionist had made the reservation. for the babysitter that morning through housekeeping, so he was aware that such a reservation had been made, so you can imagine that when asking this question the person at the reception had no doubt that he was the one who said that era now with the sweet key card in his possession bettencourt could go back to his classic scam, he has the key card and the room number and he heads towards the room, he makes sure no one is inside, he enters the suite of the hotel and then proceeds to a generous sweep of the room to see if there was anything of priceless value inside the room before calling the hotel operator, basically telling them that your children messed with the safe combination and changed it, so you can't get into the safe and someone could come and give you access to the safe in turn the operator contacted the hotel security officer to service the guest suite for your purpose after improvising access to the room bettencourt was able to go back to his script tested the security guard had a room safe device with him which he placed in the safe and within a minute or two he managed to open the safe duringThis time Bettencourt made small talk and gave the appearance that he was, for all intents and purposes, the guest in that room.

Bettencourt was completely convincing. The scam had worked once again. When the security guard opened the first safe, he noticed a large amount of cash and also passports. Bettencourt asked him if he could please open the safe in the second bedroom. The security guard went to the second bedroom and opened the safe again. bettencourt had given the same excuse my kids are doing this to the safes every place we go the security guard had no suspicions bettencourt just opened the safes then left and bettencourt was able to get to work helping himself with everything that was in the safe It was an American passport, an American Express card, a ruby ​​ring and 2,000 pounds in cash.

He then sealed both savings by entering his own PIN numbers and then proceeded to leave the room within minutes. 75 minutes after entering the hotel where Bettencourt had been. Two thousand pounds in US dollars, not to mention credit card jewelery and passport, were stolen against all odds. Bettencourt had made him a master con artist as he left the hotel that morning. Bettencourt went to Grafton Street which would be the upscale shopping district in the Dublin city area using the American Express card he had stolen he bought several expensive items at various stores in the area his first port of call was a record store nearby from grafton street where he spent £500 on cds and dvds and was just preparing for what was to come, he set about buying a large amount of expensive clothes before going to one of the most exclusive jewelers in the Dublin city area and buy a Rolex watch with a card for 16,000 euros in one hour.

By leaving the hotel, Bettencourt had spent almost twenty thousand pounds, including eleven thousand pounds on a watch, and Juan Bettencourt had done so long before the hotel residents realized that something was wrong in his suite. The American visitors that Bettencourt had robbed only realized that their safe had been emptied the next day when they were packing to leave and they couldn't get into the safe and they called hotel security and were very surprised to hear the man security who told them what had happened the day before. The guests were equally surprised, of course, when the safes were opened and there was nothing inside.

The family had been robbed and up until that point they had had I have no idea that these crimes can often be dismissed as romantic, you know, faceless crimes committed by this smart, elegant con man who comes in and cons people and charms them with his Smart talk, but these are real people involved here, they must have felt violated. You know, breaking in and stealing their personal property is not something anonymous, it's real and it's painful because Bettencourt doesn't actually have to face his victims, it's not a direct scam, he doesn't actually have to think about the consequences for those victims and imagine. who can pass himself off as a bit of a rogue, you know, and really look at me, aren't I devilish?

I do not dare? He watches what I do without having to think about the emotional side of what he is doing. and the devastation it is causing after the disturbing discovery, the police were considered the priority in the early stages of the investigation because Detective Constable Brian Mcclin was gathering as much information as possible when I saw the CCTV footage inside the hotel and could see the man who was singled out by the security guard when the sewer had opened the safe, a picture was developing of how events unfolded on June 16, 2005. The problem was that no one had any idea who the cunning thief of the safe was. hotel or where it was.

But the credit card he had stolen revealed his movements after he left the five-star hotel. I learned the information by talking to American Express about the number of transactions that took place on the card after it was stolen. Now I decided what I would do. What I would do is call each of the stores for two reasons: one was to check the CCTV footage of Beckon Court carrying out the transactions and the second would have been to obtain the original receipts which would have been handled by Bettencourt when he signed various transactions. and those receipts can pick up evidence of fingerprints while the documents were being reviewed for fingerprints, brian mcclinn returned to the five star hotel to formally interview the employees and had a stroke of luck that morning, he was waiting to speak to the manager of security that was in the In the lobby I picked up a newspaper from the United Kingdom.

I read an article on one of the pages about a flamboyant jewel thief who had escaped from a UK prison. From what I read, this jewelry thief was a person who attacked hotel rooms when the security guard came to see me. In the lobby, I immediately showed him the newspaper and told him it was him and he said yes. The Dublin gardener now knew that they were looking for Juan Bettencourt and then reading the article I could see that the London Metropolitan Police had had previous dealings with them and they were mentioned in the article, so that was my first point of contact.

I really suspected that Bettencourt would have left the jurisdiction at that point, but having spoken to the London Metropolitan Police, they said there was no way he would definitely still be in Dublin and he would definitely hit you again. Brian Mcclin sent out a warning to the other high-end hotels. range of the city warning them that they could be a target. Every hotel took the warning into account, but the staff member always smiled and said that will never happen to us and it did. the attitude that Bettencourt had relied on during the decade in which he had practiced his five-star business, but the detective believed that the conman would not reside in the luxurious surroundings he stole while in Ireland, he figured that the conman's accommodations did involve less healthy environments, I had a feeling that Bettencourt would stay in a particular area of ​​Dublin city center where the hostels are located.

The reason for this was because he believed that he would keep his head down and stay in a place that he didn't ask for. Too many questions after all, Bettencourt was a man who was illegally large and I concentrated my attention on that particular district of Dublin. Brian Mcclin began using traditional detective work to see if his hunch was correct using the photograph of Bettencourt that he had available in the newspaper. article I decided to write a brochure. I spent an entire day calling all the BnB hostels and hotels in the central Dublin city area to distribute these particular leaflets.

I spoke to the hotel staff at each of those facilities and asked if the man was staying with you and if he should make contact Brian mclin's instincts paid off. We received a phone call from a nearby shelter saying that Bettencourt, the man with the steering wheel, was actually currently at the shelter due to the distance I was located. I contacted the local guard. station asking two uniformed guards to go to the hostel and arrest the man exactly a week after Bettencourt had attacked one of Dublin's main hotels. The detective's hard work had paid off and he had him in custody.

Bettencourt was wearing the same Rolex watch he bought. The previous week, on the stolen American Express card, he had in his possession an American passport that was the property of the tourist who had been a victim of the crime at the hotel and he had already manipulated it very professionally and placed his photo in it, implying that his next port of call scale was the US, years earlier he described the US as the land of opportunity, so obviously that was his plan. The gardener knew exactly who he was. However, Bettencourt was charm personified when he tried to convince Brian McClinn who he was. his alias alejandro bowl bettencourt explained to me that his name was alekandro quinca he gave me his data board and explained to me that he was a spanish citizen trying to convince me he rolled up his sleeve to show me a tattoo of the spanish national flag on his If i had not known the information that was available to me, I really would have believed him, but the detective was sure that the man he had in custody was a con man.

I just absolutely had to confirm it after I arrested Bettencourt. The standard procedure is that he took fingerprints and photographed them, that was standard procedure for all prisoners, but in particular in relation to Bettencourt, I decided that it was necessary to send his fingerprints through Interpol to the Metropolitan Police in London to confirm that the prisoner he had arrested was actually Bettencourt. and they were able to do that and they came back saying that's correct, the prince confirmed what the detective already knew and face to face, brian mclin could immediately see why bettencourt was such an effective con artist, he spoke very calmly, um, very Polite, almost.

Shy is the way he would describe it. In my opinion, he answered all the questions truthfully and fully admitted his role in the crime, but although Bettencourt believed that he was tricking the guard into releasing him on bail, he had no idea that he was not the only one who had a strategy. During Bettencourt's interrogation I decided on the strategy of not revealing to him that we knew his true identity. He was completely cooperative in relation to all aspects of the crime. The commando often has an overinflated sense of self and will sometimes want to show what they have done and how clever. which they are, so in that sense giving him enough rope to hang himself is a good idea, but there is also a sense in which um bettencourt has a high standard. month when he is arrested, which is because he is fairly certain that, because of the aliases he has used, he will not be charged with his previous crimes, he may realize that if he takes responsibility for the crimes he committed in this jurisdiction and continues the game. he plays with the police and cooperates, then he will be allowed out on bail and can escape the country.

If we had not known Bettencourt's true identity, it is likely that he would have been released on bail and subsequently fled the country, but he did not do so. we knew that we were aware of his true identity using the personality of alejandro bowl bettencourt he admitted everything only that this time the scammer was the one who was deceived he was biting my time and waiting for the right moment to say I know who you are now george juan carlos guzmán bettencourt and no It would be a long time before the conman's world collapsed and the staggering number of countries in which he was wanted was revealed in 2005.

Juan Carlos Guzmán Bettencourt's career as a conman and hotel thief had finally caught up. With him, posing as a guest, the Colombian gained access to a suite in one of the best five-star hotels in Dublin and emptied the safe of passports, jewelry, thousands of pounds and credit cards, spending more than twenty thousand pounds on them in just one hour during the interview with bettencourt regarding the hotel robbery, he was totally cooperative and respectful, um, in telling us how he spoke to the housekeeping staff, the receptionist, the security staff and how he emptied the saved

files

of the property inside.

He was also completely cooperative and truthful regarding his interactions with several people in the stores he went to with the American Express card now in custody. The scammer believed that the guard thought he was a 25-year-old Spaniard named Alejandro Bowl and confessed with in great detail what he had done on June 16, 2005. I received confirmation through Interpol that the fingerprints we had taken from the prisoner confirmed that he was Juan Carlos Guzmán-Betancourt and the information also suggested that he was wanted and had been He escaped and was wanted in several jurisdictions, but Bettencourt was completely unaware that Detective Brian Mcclin and the Dublin Constable knew that he was an infamous and internationally wanted hotel thief and conman.

Now that they had all the facts and a complete and frank confession, they could drop the bombshell that they knew it was Juan Bettencourt. I was. to him in my final interview that I began by explaining that now I know who you are now I know that you are Juan Carlos Guzmán Bettencourt now I know that you are from Colombia the prisoner said I have nothing more to tell you and he did there was no further response during that interview or in any later under the alias of alejandra bowl bettencourt had admitted everything he believed that this tactic would mean that he would be released on bail so that he could then skip the country he was wrong this time there was no escape of the scammer that same day, bettencourt was accused of offenses relating to the offenses for which he was arrested and was taken to Dublin District Court where he gave evidence of his arrest to the court and was taken into custody.

He actually applied for bail after he was charged and remained in custody until thedate of the hearing, which was the following year, when he pleaded guilty and was sentenced to two years in prison because he had been in pretrial detention and had served a good part of those two. one year into his sentence, so his release was scheduled for December 2006. While in Irish custody, Interpol issued a statement to all countries where Bettencourt was wanted, inviting them to submit an extradition request, although Bettencourt had left the British prison in 2005, he was not extradited again. For the United Kingdom, France was the first country to request an extradition order in late 2001.

Paris police arrested and briefly detained the fraudster after he tricked hotel staff into taking their room keys, albeit in his own style. habitual upon his release from Dublin in December 2006. The conman disappeared under mysterious circumstances once he was extradited. Bettencourt resurfaced in September 2009 after having disappeared for almost three years. He was arrested in Vermont after claiming he had accidentally crossed the Canadian border. -American to the United States after his car apparently broke down He was attempting to return to the country he first scammed in 1993 and once again the scammer was in American custody as he crossed into what he had described as the land of the opportunities.

He will now face a trial and sentencing for the crimes he already committed there and for which he was convicted on June 9, 2010. Bettencourt pleaded guilty to the charge of illegally entering the U.S. He faces up to 10 years. of prison. He is also wanted in four states for his crimes, including the 160,000 Las Vegas hotel robbery in 2003, and the international fraudster is likely to be prosecuted. He is also wanted in Canada, Colombia, Japan, Mexico, Russia, Thailand and Venezuela. The one Bettencourt will have access to for the foreseeable future is a prison cell, but even now that he's behind bars, the affable, handsome and charming criminal remains a complete mystery.

He is possibly one of the most accomplished scammers in the world. It's only when the police confront him and say, We know who you are, that he feels uneasy or bewildered, but otherwise seems quite proud of his crimes and what he's accomplished to date, that you wonder if it's just nature. of the scammer or if something really happened in a very difficult and private childhood that makes Bettencourt want to keep running, keep using. alias and jumping from one country to another makes you think well, will he ever be able to settle down and that's very sad.

Can he ever stop pretending? Will he be able to stop running? Now, 33 years old, Juan Carlos Guzmán Bettencourt is as enigma as when he first mysteriously arrived. in Miami in 1993 and that mystery fuels the world's fascination with the hotel scammer. He knew there was something special about this guy. He knew that he was wanted all over the world. He knew that several police forces in Europe and the United States had interest in him, but he never would have anticipated the immediate interest that occurred when he was finally arrested and brought to court. He doesn't know any other kind of lifestyle.

What else can he do? It's not so morally bad that it would be a pretty sad story.