The National Police has dismantled a criminal organization specialized in online scams that operated from Zaragoza, where they used 'mules' to divert the amounts defrauded to accounts in the name of the members of the group. In total, agents estimate that the criminals have opened more than one hundred bank accounts to seize up to 150,000 euros.
Throughout the operation, 20 people have been arrested, including the last six this past Wednesday, considered the ringleaders of the plot. During the house searches carried out that day, the agents found weapons, narcotic substances, several mobile devices, almost 35,000 euros in cash and another 11,000 in cryptocurrencies.
Operation Hook began at the beginning of the year with the arrest of several cooperators who agreed, in exchange for small amounts of money or drugs, to give up their identity to open bank accounts in which the fraudsters received the money. of the victims. These 'mules' were recruited from vulnerable people, the homeless, drug addicts and the disabled in the central neighborhood of El Gancho, one of the most degraded in the Aragonese capital.
Subsequently, these accounts were operated by the organization's own members, who were in charge of making transfers to other accounts or withdrawing the swindled money directly from ATMs.
The six ringleaders arrested this Wednesday, habitual criminals of Spanish nationality, had their roles perfectly distributed. One of them obtained the technical data and the applications through which they accessed the victims, who made transfers to the accounts indicated to them. A second developed the network to recruit the 'mules', who were directed to a series of occupied apartments or to their own homes to open the accounts they needed.
The rest were in charge of taking these people to banking entities or to buy telephone cards en masse to perpetrate the scams, as well as withdrawing money from ATMs, making purchases in stores in charge of previously opened accounts or depositing the bulk of their illicit earnings in cryptocurrency accounts.
Among the methods used by the organization for scams, the agents highlight 'smishing', a technique by which they sent an SMS to a user pretending to be a legitimate entity (social network, bank or public institution) to steal private information; 'sim swapping', which involves the fraudulent duplication of SIM cards; or the so-called 'son in trouble', in which the victim receives a message from an unknown number in which the criminals pose as a son who claims to communicate on a borrowed phone after having lost his and demands money to pay. to unforeseen difficulties.
According to the note distributed by the National Police, the operation marks an “important milestone” in the fight against cybercrime in the Aragon region.
