A Brazilian woman has been arrested after she wheeled a corpse into a bank, presumably hoping it would help her secure a loan.
Érika de Souza Vieira Nunes was captured on video by bank employees wheeling the body of Paulo Roberta Braga into a Rio De Janeiro bank branch in a wheelchair.
In the video, Nunes is heard calling Braga her uncle as she speaks to the body and props up his head, reports The Independent.
“Uncle, are you listening? You need to sign [the contract]. If you don’t sign, there’s no way, because I can’t sign for you,” Nunes is heard saying in the footage, before grabbing a pen and forcing it into the dead man’s hands.
“Sign so you don’t give me any more headaches, I can’t take it anymore,” she said to the body.
“I don’t think he’s well. He doesn’t look well at all,” one of the employees can be heard saying, according to The Guardian.
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It’s alleged that Nunes was trying to use her deceased relative to help her secure a loan for a few thousand dollars. He had died just hours before at the age of 68.
The bank staffers were so concerned about Braga’s health that they called police. When law enforcement showed up, they found that Nunes had brought a dead man into the bank.
Nunes now faces charges of violating a corpse and attempted theft through fraud, according to Rio newspaper O Dia.
“She knew he was dead … he had been dead for at least two hours,” the investigating officer, Fábio Luiz Souza, told the breakfast news program Bom Dia Rio on Wednesday.
“I have never come across a story like this in 22 years [as an officer],” added Souza.
Nunes’ lawyer says that Braga was alive when he entered the bank.
“The facts did not occur as has been narrated. Paulo was alive when he arrived at the bank,” Ana Carla de Souza Correa told reporters.
“All of this will be cleared up. We believe in Érika’s innocence.”
However, police forensic analysis determined he had died earlier, while lying down.
The Weekend at Bernie’s-style deception is reminiscent of a similar attempted scam back in 2022, when an Irish man propped up a corpse and carried him inside a post office in an effort to claim the dead man’s pension money.
Declan Haughney told the Irish Times that the deceased man was his uncle, but claimed he didn’t know the man was dead and thought that, perhaps, he’d died on the walk to the post office.
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