A computer engineer who lives in Barcelona managed to put the Administration’s computer system in check and do business selling Immigration appointments. The man created a sophisticated computer program that accessed the official website of the State to get the largest number of available shifts. He software it was leased to dozens of intermediaries who, in turn, did business with it. After several years in which Immigration appointments have been shamelessly sold on the black market for up to 200 euros, the National Police has announced that it has dismantled a network in which 94 people supposedly participated. Of them, 69 have been arrested, including the engineer. The remaining 25 have declared before the agents as investigated.
The computer scientist created in 2021 a program of software, a kind of robot, which managed to access the dating website in a repetitive and automated way. The bot managed to anticipate the moment in which each police station launched the available shifts, and blocked them in a matter of minutes. The practice, according to the police, made it impossible for any citizen to have access to appointments and forced them to pay for a free and essential procedure in the daily life of foreigners residing in Spain. In a context in which the demand for appointments has been, for years, much higher than those offered by the police, the invention was a round business. Foreigners, who spent day and night in front of the screen trying unsuccessfully to get their turn, ended up buying them through the WhatsApp and Wallapop applications, in call shops and through lawyers.
The computer program was capable of circumventing the security measures of the web page and neutralized the so-called captcha, a filter designed to discern precisely whether queries are made by humans or computer robots. It also tricked the system by automatically entering data from the interested parties and changing the IP address of each device to prevent the server from blocking requests due to excessive requests from the same device.
The police investigations, coordinated by agents of the Central Unit of Illegal Immigration Networks and Document Falsities (UCRIF), identified that, from the system created by the engineer, a “criminal network” had been formed to which he rented the computer program . The engineer, who is around 40 years old, had created a company with which he leased his robot to dozens of interested parties. The program was offered to different managers of immigration procedures as a robot that obtained appointments in a “totally autonomous” way, which generates “emails infinite” and that “allows you to add a filter by police stations and dates”, according to the documentation to which El PAÍS has had access. Installation was easy, a simple Google Chrome extension. Every appointment made with the software it was charged at 15 euros plus VAT, a price that the intermediaries multiplied for their own benefit until asking, in some isolated cases, more than 1,200 euros.
The computer scientist and his accomplices recorded the commercial exchange in commercial contracts in which a license to use the robot was recognized. In addition, the collection was made through bank transfers directed to a company account, which in the same year of its creation, in 2021, declared a net turnover of more than half a million euros, according to the accounts presented in the Mercantile Registry. The rent of the software it included access to a spreadsheet where the data of the foreigners interested in dating was entered, essential information for the robot to formalize the request. There are detainees in 17 provinces, considered by the police as alleged perpetrators of the crimes of belonging to a criminal organization and computer damage.
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In conversation with EL PAÍS, the investigated engineer and the administrator of his company defend their innocence. “Our intention was always to create a legal system to get appointments that were no longer available to citizens. That is why we have always gone with our names and a company ahead, to make everything legal. We have never considered that this was an illegal or criminal activity, because at no time is any data or web system damaged ”, they maintain. “It is not true that we monopolized appointments, far from it,” they say. Both defend the robot as “a service” that prevented thousands of people from spending months in front of the computer to get an appointment. They also warn that they are not the only ones: “There are many more robots that have a website. The difference is that they do not have a company and it is not known who is behind it”.
In a first phase of the investigation, the police arrested the engineer and three other people considered “main members” of the organization in February. In the actions carried out in Barcelona and Valencia, a large number of computer effects, various documentation and a total of 206,950 euros in cash were seized. After those arrests, according to the police press release, an economic investigation of the main investigated was carried out and the company that the engineer used to rent the bot was identified. Thanks to the intervened documentation, part of the huge group of people who either rented the program to hack the system themselves or acted as a link in the sale of appointments was detected, among them dozens of Immigration lawyers from whom a statement was taken throughout last April.
The most profitable business was in the sale of previous appointments to request asylum, a process with a skyrocketing demand (almost 120,000 applications in 2022 alone) and little supply. In fact, after finding out that the system had been hacked, the National Police took unilateral measures, in parallel with the investigations and, overnight, at the end of March, the shifts to request asylum, priced at 200 euros, stopped to be available on the official website. The police improvised different systems in each province to get a turn (by email or by phone, mainly), a formula that, according to the Immigration lawyers, does not work either.
Juan Ospina, defense attorney for some twenty lawyers who hired the computer program, considers that his clients are not the perpetrators of any computer crime, but, in any case, accomplices. According to Ospina, what the lawyers did was buy the appointments to be able to provide their documentation processing services, since it was practically impossible to get an appointment through the normal channels. The police maintain, however, that the intermediaries, lawyers, managers, advisers and other procurers with whom the company providing the software “They were aware of and aware of the existence of computer damage against the official dating website and the corresponding harm caused to foreigners who, on many occasions, found themselves in a situation of great vulnerability and despair.”
Aliens appointments are the most precious product in clandestine resale, but they are not the only one. In fact, the sale of shifts has spread in the Administration and affects other essential services, such as those of Social Security or the DGT. The management of the web through which prior appointments are requested is not the responsibility of the National Police or the Ministry of the Interior, but rather it corresponds to the Territorial Policy and Finance departments, two ministries mocked by this hacker. The size of the hole created by this and other people with their respective robots is still unknown. According to police sources, there are still previous appointments that disappear from the website at the time they are offered.
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