The crime of harassment (art. 660 of the Italian Criminal Code) can also be committed by means of one single telephone call, as recently ruled by the Italian Supreme Court (judgement no. 52099/2018). For the Court, in fact, if the telephone call is offensive towards this is sufficient to recognise the harassment.
In the case at issue, a woman receives an anonymous phone call from a man. During the conversation, the victim received obscene and vulgar expressions that led her to immediately close the phone call. Once the other party had been identified, the judge of the first instance condemned him to pay a fine of € 300,000.
Even though the offender stated that he called the wrong number, in the second instance the Italian Supreme Court considered that only one call was sufficient to constitute the crime, because it is not depending on the quantity, but on the seriousness of the harassment.
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