The Sardinian accent? "He didn't feel much and what little I felt seemed normal to me because he told me he lived in Sardinia".
Roberto Cazzaniga, the volleyball player scammed by a Cagliari woman who pretended to be the super model Alessandra Ambrosio, reconstructs in Verissimo the incredible story of which he was the protagonist in spite of himself: for fifteen years, since he was 28, the victim of a scam that it cost him 700 thousand euros.
The contact of the alleged Ambrosio, who called himself "Maya", had been passed to him by a friend, or rather a former friend, as Cazzaniga defines her: "From that moment I began to feel her until I fell in love with her".
The one he believed to be the Brazilian Victoria's Secret model had a vaguely Sardinian accent, but that didn't make him suspicious at all: “He didn't feel much. Even a Sardinian friend who heard it was unable to catch it. Then he told me that he was in Sardinia, what little I felt he could have taken from the people around him ".
Have you ever had doubts? “Yes, but they were erased from his words and images. I believed it ". Even when the woman on the other end of the phone, who was telling him about allegedly serious health problems, started asking for money: “She said she was having trouble using her accounts. I decided to support her, her family and friends ”. Since that moment he has lost 700 thousand euros: his money as long as he could, then borrowed when he himself ended up on the street. “I was in love, so much so that for fifteen years I didn't have other girls: I remained faithful to that person”.
When “I asked to see her, to get close to her also to help her, every time there was an excuse: 'It's not possible because I have heart problems, I have to have an operation'. But then there was another problem ”.
And the fashion shows on the other side of the world? "He told me that he went there to see specialists and that he was able to do them by pulling himself up with drugs."
"I couldn't say stop". Fortunately, friends and teammates intervened: it was they who contacted “Le Iene” because, suspicious, they wanted the truth. Even at that moment Cazzaniga hoped until the end that he had not been a victim of a scam: “I wanted to believe that Le Iene would find Ambrosio and help her because I couldn't anymore”.
"When they told me it wasn't her it was painful", she recalls, in tears. Yet "every now and then I don't hide from you that I still miss it. Horrible that this has happened to me, that there are those who take advantage of people like me. Now I'm still cautious, I can't trust ”.
(Unioneonline / D)
