The National Police warned that they were swindling clients by threatening to physically injure them and reveal the messages they had written to their families
Agents belonging to the Higher Headquarters of Valencia and the Dénia Judicial Police Brigade in an operation carried out at the national level during the months of November and December detained thirteen people belonging to a criminal group in the towns of Murcia and Valencia, the which, allegedly, were dedicated to extorting people who contacted prostitutes through the internet.
In La Rioja, the Specialized and Violent Crime Unit of the Provincial Judicial Police Brigade carried out three investigations in recent months in which the authors detained in the nationwide operation were identified in a new form of fraud that is being attempted committing in the Community, after three people have filed a complaint for two attempts at extortion.
The scam is generally directed at men who request services of erotic or sexual content through the internet with a woman who is offered publicly. In 2021, four complaints were received at the La Rioja Higher Police Headquarters, where similar events are reported.
So far there is no evidence that the threats from the alleged scammers have materialized. The Police recommends not making any payments and warns that once the first of them materializes to the payer, a series of interminable requests will follow.
The operation at the national level began as a result of the number of complaints filed by the injured parties existing throughout the national territory. The investigation was carried out by agents of the Judicial Police Brigades of the Dénia Police Station and the Valencia Superior Headquarters based on the complaints received.
‘Modus operandi’
After becoming interested in the sexual services offered in false advertisements on various web pages, the victims received various threatening messages from an unknown number. It was the supposed head of the girls, who reproached them for wasting their time and demanded an amount of money as financial compensation under threat of physical harm or the publication of those messages as well as communication with their relatives.
The researchers think that these first messages could be sent automatically and with the same text to a large number of random people, with the sole objective that some of them were answered and thus establish a first contact. Once established, the detainees carried out social engineering work, conducting searches in open sources in relation to their victims, to find out as much information as possible about their private life to threaten them and obtain a greater financial outlay for them.
They used images of menacing-looking people in their profile photos and emulated the accent of Eastern European citizens when making phone calls. In the following conversations, they made their victims verify that they knew enough information about them to let their relatives know what they had done or to go where they were to inflict physical harm on them.
The victims, either to prevent their relatives from knowing that they had contacted prostitutes or because of fear of a real risk to their life or that of their family, agreed to pay through bank transfers, payment service providers or money codes. But the authors didn’t stop there. On some occasions, the extortionists sent their victims photos of other alleged previous victims who, they say, had been attacked or mutilated for not wanting to pay the financial amount.
Within the criminal group not all carried out the same work, two of the detainees were considered the leaders and those in charge of obtaining personal data and threatening the injured, the other three arrested were used as “mules” to open and manage bank accounts where the victims’ money was entered, work for which they received ten percent of what was extorted.
In this way, they managed to get the victims to transfer them between 1,000 and 6,000 euros, deliveries that they made through bank transfers, wallet cards or even instant payment service providers. From a study of the bank accounts used by the detainees, it has been possible to infer that those arrested could have obtained a profit of about 150,000 euros during the last year.
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