Judicial police in the North have detained five suspects posing as employees of a financial institution who urged victims to hand over the codes of cards with which they carried out transactions for large amounts, it became known on Tuesday.
The statement of the Judicial Police (SP) explains that in the context of this criminal activity, the detainees posed as employees of a financial institution (“vishing” transactions – a method in which the phone is used to steal personal information), named by the victims, who, in fact, believed that they were contacted by a financial institution, warning them of possible suspicious transactions conducted with their card.
“In this way, they cleverly forced the victims to provide bank codes, which made it possible to carry out illegal transactions for very large amounts (on the order of hundreds of thousands of euros) with the data of the respective credit cards of these financial institutions,” he stressed.
According to the SP, the information used to commit these crimes was obtained through unauthorized access to legitimate databases, to which one of the defendants had access in the course of his professional activities.
Following this call center operation, five people were arrested, and in Porto, Paredes, Gondomar, Guimarães, Espinho and Aveiro, seven house searches and two out-of-house searches were carried out, during which there were “various materials representing evidentiary interest. was captured. .
The moves are the result of the development of a “comprehensive investigation” in which the other three defendants have already been in pre-trial detention since October last year, the SP said.
Detainees between the ages of 21 and 36 are suspected of committing crimes related to misuse of a guarantee card or card, device or payment data, qualified fraud, aggravated data misuse, aggravated access and money laundering.
The five suspects, three men and two women of Portuguese nationality, will be present at the first court hearing at the Criminal Court (TIC) in Porto.
Author: Portuguese
Source: CM Jornal
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