Agents of the National Police have arrested five people in the towns of Murcia (1) and Valencia (4) who formed a criminal network allegedly dedicated to committing extortion through the Internet to people who at some point had used dating sites or contact ads on the web.
The investigation has been carried out by agents of the Judicial Police Brigades of the Dénia Police Station and the Valencia Superior Headquarters based on the complaints of a total of four injured parties. The way of acting of those arrested was almost always the same, the perpetrators communicated with their victims through text messages
by instant messaging applications in which they made it understood that they were very angry for having lost a lot of time to one of their “company girls” and that for this they had to be financially compensated under threat of physical harm or the publication of those messages or of communication to 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 this first contact was established, the detainees carried out social engineering work, conducting searches in open sources in relation to their victims, to try to find out as much information as possible about their private lives in order 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 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 go where they were to inflict physical harm on them, all with the petty purpose of tormenting them enough to to enter the requested money.
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.
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.
Those arrested, three men and two women of Spanish and Brazilian nationalities, were turned over to the judicial authority.
