Scams using the "spoofing" technique: eleven arrests between Giugliano and Naples.

This morning, the Carabinieri of the Company of Giugliano in Campania they carried out an order of pre-trial detention – issued by the GIP of the Court of Naples North at the request of this Public Prosecutor's Office – against eleven subjects, ten of whom are in custody in prison and one under house arrest, seriously accused to varying degrees of the crimes of acriminal association, fraud, receiving stolen goods and improper use and counterfeiting of various payment instruments from cash.

The investigation – coordinated by this Prosecutor's Office and conducted by the Carabinieri of the Giugliano in Campania Company with the collaboration with American Express, Leroy Merlin and some banking institutions, including Poste Italiane, PayPal, Intesa San Paolo, UniCredit and Bnp – has allowed us to reconstruct the modus operandi of acomplex criminal organization dedicated to fraud, active among the Municipalities of Giugliano in Campania and Naples: thousands of euros were stolen from the victims' current accounts through the so-called spoofing technique, or through calls in which the scammer pretended to be an operator from the victim's bank in order to defraud him.

In particular, the suspects purchased from Dark Web data lists containing personal details, telephone numbers and bank account information and carefully selected the targets based on their age, focusing on older people, taking advantage of their fragility.

After having forwarded phishing messages with fake payment charges and links to fake websites that reproduced the banking institutions, the suspects waited for the user to fall into the trap, contacted him again and They pretended to be bank operators in order to obtain sensitive data from their current accounts. The victims, convinced that they were carrying out the operations in order to recover the money allegedly stolen during a cyber attack, provided card numbers, PINs and OTPs.

At that point the suspects, having obtained the necessary codes, They quickly made large purchases of household appliances and building materials from the Leroy Merlin company website, including drills, air conditioners, boilers and electrical cables, which were immediately collected from the Giugliano in Campania sales point by a series of couriers and then resold to the network of fences.

Using the same techniques but with a different method, the criminal group convinced the victims of the need to move the money that had not yet been stolen, inducing them to make bank transfers to nominee bank accounts.

The subjects investigated they operated daily with the aim of completely emptying the accounts of the victims, who were convinced that they could not be identified and stopped, especially because of the ways in which they came into contact with the elderly people who were the recipients of the messages.

The scenario outlined by the investigations turned out to be particularly alarming, both for the number of victims and for the methods through which they obtained the data and organized the phone calls and messages to deceive the elderly.

During the investigations, the following were reconstructed: twenty-two episodes of fraud committed, numerous fraud attempts blocked through military intervention, Computer systems used in the scams were seized, and cash and watches worth more than one hundred and fifty thousand euros were recovered.