A 23-year-old man from Szczecin, Poland, is in pre-trial detention and faces up to eight years in prison after prosecutors charged him with using cash-on-delivery food orders as a harassment tool, including one request for 300 pizzas and another billed at more than 37,000 zloty, about $10,000.
Officers from Poland’s Central Bureau for Combating Cybercrime arrested him at his home in mid-August after an investigation supervised by the District Prosecutor’s Office in Szczecin. They seized phones, data drives, and other devices they say were used to place the orders.
The man has not been publicly named. He was charged with persistent harassment and making criminal threats. He denied the charges. Prosecutor Artur Mądrzak said he gave a long statement whose details investigators are still checking.
A court ordered two months of pre-trial detention. He can leave if he posts a 10,000 zloty surety, about $2,700.
The scheme, as police describe it, ran for about eight months. Orders went out online with payment due at the door. Names, phone numbers, emails, and delivery addresses kept changing. Recipients were private residents and, in some cases, public figures from politics and media.
Senior Constable Michał Pietraszko of the CBZC press team said one order topped 37,000 zloty. Another restaurant received a request for 300 pizzas and canceled it because the kitchen could not produce that volume. Most deliveries were aimed at Szczecin. Investigators also logged more than a dozen similar cases in Warsaw, Kraków, and Wrocław.
People listed as customers did not know an order had been placed in their name. Drivers still showed up asking to be paid.
The comments attached to some orders are what pulled the case out of the prank category. Pietraszko said the notes included details that, in the bureau’s view, only the targets or people close to them would know. The same fields carried threats: kidnapping a minor, setting fire to a notary’s office, causing a traffic crash. At least five people are treated as victims of those threats.
Mądrzak said that in one instance the suspect allegedly offered to stop if a victim withdrew a criminal complaint.
Among the names used on order forms, according to TVN24, were television presenter Hubert Urbański and musician Maciej Maleńczuk. Those particular deliveries were not filled because the restaurant spotted them as fake.
Bartosz Kowalski, owner of Heat’s Pizza in Szczecin, told the same outlet his shop took 60 to 70 of the bogus orders. Some were caught before the ovens started. Others went out. Losses ran to several thousand zloty. The smaller fakes, 150 to 200 zloty, looked like ordinary tickets. The 5,000 and 7,000 zloty tickets did not.
“A Saturday order at 9 p.m. to the other end of Szczecin can wreck the whole delivery run. Regular customers pay for that,” Kowalski said. Names and addresses kept rotating, he added, which made it hard to block the traffic. He gathered what he could and passed it to police.
Michał Kaczmarek of the Northern Chamber of Commerce said several Szczecin pizzerias and takeout spots were hit. One shop saw three or four fraudulent tickets in a single week. Drivers burned fuel and hours on addresses that produced no payment. Kitchens burned product.
Lawmakers have already used the case to poke at a gap in Polish fraud law. Member of Parliament Dariusz Matecki filed an interpellation with the justice minister after the arrest. Article 286 of the Criminal Code requires an intent to obtain a financial benefit. A person who places a fake order only to harass someone or wreck a restaurant’s night may not fit that frame. Matecki asked prosecutors which statute they are using and proposed expanding fraud to cover harm inflicted for its own sake.
The charges now on the docket are harassment and criminal threats, each carrying a maximum of eight years if a court convicts. Investigators have not stated a motive. Dexerto and Euronews both reported that point as still open.
Joint work by the CBZC and the Investigative Department of Szczecin Municipal Police Headquarters led officers to the apartment. The bureau posted a notice of the detention on August 17. TVN24 published its account four days later.
Restaurants that spotted oversized tickets in time avoided the worst of the loss. The people whose names, family details, and home addresses appeared on the slips did not get that choice. They found a driver at the door, or a threat in a comment field, and a bill they never asked for.
