Agents of the Mossos and the National Police have arrested 12 people as alleged perpetrators of a crime continued fraud, falsehood, reception, usurpation of civil status and criminal organization. This criminal organization operated in different parts of Spain. They had specialized in this criminal modality for years and their modus operandi consisted of impersonating the identity of bank clients to make fraudulent money transfers to other accounts or to make cash withdrawals, and specifically in the last year they had managed to carry out scams worth more than one million euros, with more than 90 complaints collected by the different police forces.
To do this, they established well-defined roles in the organization with specialization of tasks.
On the one hand, there were people who provided the organization with the original personal identity documents that served as the basis for carrying out the scams and which came mostly from previous robberies and thefts; secondly, there were the people who impersonated the identities and who made the refunds and / or bank transfers and finally there was the person in charge of coordinating everything, giving instructions and distributing the profits among the members.
physical resemblance
His way of acting consisted of collecting at first large number of identity documents Personal information that came from robberies and thefts mainly and that should serve to impersonate the identity of the clients of banking entities looking for collaborators that had a physical resemblance to the holders of these documents.
Later they tried to find out which entities the victims had Open checking accounts and their balance, requesting a bank statement of the accounts, and once this information was obtained, they traveled to other remote geographical areas within the national territory where they made cash withdrawals at branches of the same entity. Thanks to their social skills and their persuasiveness, they were able to deceive the workers of the banking entities and evade the security controls in this type of operation to carry out the withdrawals of money and on those occasions when they saw that the cash withdrawal was more risk, requested to make money transfers to checking accounts controlled by the organization itself, through mules or front men, to later extract the money in cash.
In Andalucia
These actions were very lucrative for them, since these displacements throughout the Spanish national territory allowed them, in just two weeks, to obtain between €50,000 and €100,000. Andalusia was one of the preferred regions of the state to make these trips.
The joint team made up of agents from the Mossos d’Esquadra and the National Police Corps began investigations in early 2022 when analyzing the complaints filed and thanks to police cooperation mechanisms, it was detected that there was a common pattern of fraudulent banking operations in which fraudsters impersonated customer identities.
Related news
The police arrest operation that was carried out on June 28 simultaneously in the provinces of Barcelona and Granada made it possible to arrest the main leaders of the organization. Specifically, twelve people were arrested and 7 entries and searches were carried out, in which more than 270 identity documents, drugs, luxury items and more than €90,000 that had its origin in scams that had been committed a few days ago in Andalusia.
Within the framework of this operation, on July 13, a worker from a bank was arrested as a collaborator of the criminal organization.