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The Civil Guard dismantles a criminal group dedicated to carrying out scams through the internet at a national level (19/02/2019)

The authors used the method known as "phishing", sending an email to the injured people, posing as their bank and requesting a username and password |

A total of 33 scam crimes committed in several Spanish provinces have been clarified

A total of 13 authors related to this scam have been identified

The Civil Guard, in the framework of the operation "PICOTA", has managed to identify those responsible for numerous scams at the national level, committed through the internet

The police investigation began as a result of having knowledge through a complaint lodged at the Civil Guard Post of Peralta (Navarra), in which the victim stated that he had made eight unauthorized bank transactions amounting to 500 euros each , being the total amount scam of 4,000 euros.

Initiated the investigations by the Judicial Police of the Civil Guard, it is detected that to access this money had been used a method known as "phishing", which is that the authors send an email to the injured person, in this case simulating being your bank, requesting your username and password, informing that if you do not insert them in the link that appeared, your current account will be blocked.

Once the keys were obtained, they accessed the current account of the victim and extracted the money through a mobile-to-mobile payment application (application with which several banking entities work), varying the amount extracted between 100 and 4,000 euros.

Analyzed various information and documentation, there is suspicion on the part of investigators that there could be more victims throughout the national territory, reaching to locate a total of 33 victims in many Spanish provinces.

To carry out the scam, they used different e-mail accounts (15 in total), associated with a provider of these e-mails, called @ cox.net, based in the US.

After collecting all the information and once analyzed, it was possible to locate the participants in these scams, being a total of 13 people (6 in Cádiz, 3 in Murcia and 2 in Madrid and Alicante), of Spanish nationalities, Moroccan, French and Bulgarian

Those involved in these events were settled in various Spanish provinces, Murcia, Alicante, Madrid and Cádiz being the same.

Mula-Phishing System

The intermediary or "mule" is one of the fundamental pieces of this type of scams.

Normally, these types of people are recruited through the network, sometimes under an apparent contract of legal work done by organizations, and in which the "work" of these mules is to make available to the organization their bank accounts to enter various amounts of money that have cheated through the Internet using different methods.

Subsequently, these mules must re-send to these criminal groups those amounts of money that they have received, to which they must discount the commission that appears in the false contracts and that ranges between 10% and 20% of the money entered.

In many of the occasions, these mules are themselves victims of deception, since they do not have knowledge of the real activity of the supposed companies, that under the appearance of a supposedly legal activity, being accomplices of this criminal activity when sending these amounts of money swindled to foreign countries through money transfer companies, shipments that are made on behalf of third parties that under false identities make it difficult to identify them.

With this operation, in which several units of the Civil Guard have participated, it has been possible to clarify a total of 33 crimes of scams committed in several provinces, in addition to a complaint registered in the Police of Germany, bringing the total of the scam to more than 40,000 euros.

Provinces and localities affected:

- Seville: Santiponce, Utrera, Alcalá del Río

- Madrid: Buitrago de Lozoya, Ciudad Lineal, Fuenlabrada

- Cádiz: Los Barrios, Chiclana, Jerez

- Soria: Ã“lvega

- Granada: La Zubia, (2) Macarena, Granada capital

- Murcia: Cieza

- Las Palmas: Neighborhood

- Navarra: Peralta

- Valencia: Tavernes, Carcaixent, Paterna

- Alicante: Torrevieja (2)

- Balearic Islands: Fields