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Date Published: 14/09/2022
ARCHIVED - Dozens arrested in Murcia and Cartagena over banking scam worth 600,000 euros
Several other fraudsters were apprehended in Madrid, Valencia and Barcelona
A widespread criminal network specialising in a ‘vishing’ scam has been broken up by the National Police this week, with arrests not only in the municipalities of Murcia and Cartagena but as far as Madrid, Barcelona and Valencia.
A total of 45 fraudsters were apprehended, accused of scamming an incredible 600,000 euros by impersonating Spanish banks in order to glean personal information from their victims.
This huge sum of money was defrauded from only nine people and the scam was pulled off by the creation of two fake web pages, designed to supplant the real financial institutions.
Official sources report that the websites appeared perfectly authentic and the victims had no qualms about entering their banking and personal details as normal. Once they did this, the criminals had full access and wasted no time in cloning the unfortunate customers’ SIM cards.
With free reign over the duped person’s phone line it was a simple matter of logging onto their online banking and transferring all available funds to a third party.
The scam is brilliant in its simplicity: by duplicating the victim’s SIM card, the fraudsters were able to overcome the security obstacle of receiving an authorisation code from the bank, but they only had a window of a few hours in which to act, until the person realised their phone no longer had network coverage.
Once the swindle was uncovered, investigators blocked the offending websites to prevent further victims falling prey.
As part of the probe, officers raided two homes in Cartagena and found, among other things, fake IDs, a printer used for forging documents and numerous credit cards.
The suspects now face various charges including identity theft and computer fraud.
Image: Archive
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