Two thousand euros for a (false) diploma from Oss. And a cheated trainee committed suicide

The investigation by the Prosecutor of Castrovillari sheds light on a criminal association of which two employees of the Cosenza ASP would be part. 300 educational qualifications seized. "To give the appearance of officiality, they organized courses in the structure of the Trebisacce hospital" – VIDEO AND NAMES

by Michele Presta
CASTROVILLARI They took advantage of the willingness of young Calabrians to emancipate themselves through work as social health workers and cheat them with fake training courses. For this reason, four people operating in the sector of training institutes and two employees of the Cosenza ASP have been sent a precautionary custody order in prison. Criminal association aimed at fraud and forgery are the accusations made by the prosecutor of Castrovillari, coordinated by Eugenio Facciolla. There is another one on which the carabinieri are investigating: the suicide of a boy. According to investigators, the trail to beat is that of instigating suicide. "We came across investigations in this episode – explains the attorney Facciolla – we believe that this boy could be an established victim of this system. When you discover scams you always come across people who have the strength to report because they realize that something is not right and others instead accept it, participating in fact in the scam. We must not forget, however, that often it happens that due to need or other reasons we also accept illicit situations ». Edoardo Scavelli, Saverio Epifano, Domenico Pucci, Antonio Vincenzo Cuccaro, Alfonso Anna Sacco and Enrico Novissimo are all in jail.
According to the investigations carried out by the military of the Nas and ended up in the investigation called "Ponzi" (here the news) the arrested ones would have organized, in the years 2015/2017, over 30 courses of social health operator and social health operator with complementary training, through a professional school specifically established in Altomonte in the province of Cosenza, called "Southern Europe", without accreditation to the Calabria Region. Each trainee had to pay € 2,000 to the school, so it is estimated that the illicit gain could be around € 570,000. "This is a big scam that we discovered thanks to a series of complaints that we crossed with the data we were available from our controls". Lieutenant Colonel Vincenzo Maresca, commander of the Nas, then added that investigations are still ongoing as well as the seizure of around 300 educational qualifications. "Each region has accredited schools – the colonel explained – who attends these courses can make sure that they are not victims of fraud by addressing the region and making sure that the school they are attending is accredited at the regional level. The Calabrian school ended up under investigation had no accreditation title ". As emerged during the press conference, which was attended also by the attorney general Otello Lupacchini, the students were recruited through the prospect of an easy job opening. But the standards aimed at employment were far from being respected. The trainees, in fact, would have attended evanescent theoretical-practical courses in which they were offered a totally inadequate professional training, not corresponding to the standards that the law provides. In the case of the "Southern Europe" school, the investigations have confirmed that the teaching was managed in a superficial manner. The lessons were initially held in the premises of the former hospital of Trebisacce where two of the arrested still worked, all for the sole purpose of providing the students with an appearance of prestige and officiality in the courses. «The use of hospital rooms – admits Facciolla – is only useful to give the appearance of officiality to the scam that was actually being implemented. And the two ASP employees of Cosenza in this context have a fundamental role also because in addition to recruitment they were also involved in the transport of students to Campania where many supported the qualifying examination. The people who worked with us on the survey also explained how they were given the answers to the quiz they had to support so that they could be memorized and easily overcome the professionalizing exam ". The final tests were held in Naples, before the official commission of the Campania Region, unaware of the real training course of the students. The entire fraudulent system was made possible by the decisive contribution of the two members representing as many training institutes regularly accredited to the Campania Region, the Sa.Dra. and the Check-up Training, which provided for the construction of a false training course for students coming from the Southern Europe school, including graduates in the lists of their Oss and Osss courses, thus proving that the Calabrian students had attended the theoretical lessons in their classrooms and training periods in the Nursing Homes Villa Angela of Naples and Ios Meluccio of Pomigliano D'Arco, where in reality the students had never set foot. ([email protected])