The Civil Guard arrested more than 40 alleged members of a group criminal organization who managed to accumulate an inheritance valued at more than 800,000 euros and obtained monetary funds totaling 1,400,000 euros between 2019 and 2023 through technological SMS scams.
According to a statement from the armed institute, the ‘SMS Bank’ operationcarried out over the last two years by the @ team and the Economic Crimes Team of the Organic Unit of the Judicial Police of Almeria, under the direction of the Court of Instruction number 5, is still open.
The detainees are aged between 22 and 29 and are accused of crimes of belonging to criminal organization, money laundering offense and technological fraud offense. In addition, the Civil Guard is investigating two legal entities that were allegedly used as front companies for money laundering operations.
It was possible to uncover about a hundred crimes in more than 40 different banking entities and recover a large part of the defrauded money from the customers of these accounts. The alleged fraudsters used methods such as: “identity theft” and “smishing” and sent mass text messages alerting victims of an alleged security breach in their bank accounts.
They subsequently contacted the victims by telephone and They pretended to be bank employees to obtain their credentials and divert funds to the organization through digital banking. Members of this network were able to simulate phone calls from the bank.
The victim, believing he was canceling a suspicious transaction, provided the criminals with a verification code series This effectively confirmed the transaction. In this way, the members of the organization had access to their digital banking services to make transfers, some via Bizum, and even take out loans for immediate granting.
The amounts defrauded from victims varied considerably, ranging from 200 and 90,000 euros. Before committing computer scams throughout the country, the leader of the organization accessed customer data by exploiting security flaws in banking entities.
Subsequently, he shared this sensitive information with other members of the group, who used it to more easily deceive victims. The organization received money illegally through the use of advanced cloud services, from which it could store data on the web or run programs from any location and device with Internet access.
From there, they created fraudulent web pages and They sent massive SMS messages and repeated calls (SMS). They also used servers in other countries and virtual private network (VPN) services to browse securely and anonymously and to be able to hide their IP addresses and connect to the network from a different location to where they were actually operating.
All this allowed them to divert money through 43 bank accounts identified so far, and even convert it into cryptocurrencies. Another complexity of the investigation was the identification of the main suspects, who were also linked to bank accounts with headquarters in countries such as Germany, Belgium, Lithuania, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. This link could be demonstrated through collaboration with EUROPOL.
Through these operations, the respondents managed to accumulate assets valued at more than 800,000 euros and obtained monetary funds totaling 1,400,000 euros between the years 2019 and 2023. Additionally, 43 bank accounts and more than 200 cryptocurrency wallets are registered.
