Criminal cyber scam group brought down with arrests in Malaga and nine other cities

A criminal gang which allegedly swindled 45 people of more than 75,000 euros has been taken down, with arrests in Malaga and nine other cities.

National Police followed a trail left by the source code of some fake websites which eventually led them to locate members of the cyber-criminal gang. Officers arrested 27 people in Malaga, Madrid, Barcelona, Lérida, Tarragona, Zaragoza, Tenerife, Castellón, Zamora and Palma de Mallorca.

They are accused of fraud, money laundering and membership of a criminal group. However, the number of people allegedly involved amounts to 64, eight of whom have not been arrested but are under investigation, police said.

The police investigation started after a significant increase in the number of complaints from customers of the same bank who claimed to have been swindled.

The victims allegedly received an SMS from their bank alerting them to an alleged fraudulent payment that they had to cancel. The message sent them to a web page, which pretended to be that of the bank, and they were asked for their online banking access details, as well as the digital signatures of the transactions.

The cybercriminals allegedly used two common techniques in this type of scam. One is known as smishing, a technique that consists of a cybercriminal sending an SMS to a user pretending to be a legitimate entity, and the other is known as spoofing, an illegal practice that consists of impersonating a person's electronic identity to hide one's own.

According to the National Police in a statement, the fake websites had been created by the same person and the members of the organisation used it as a bait, managing to deceive 45 people who were swindled out of more than 75,000 euros.

The money obtained through the digital scams was channelled through Fiat money exchange companies and cryptocurrencies, as well as Neobancos and Challenger Banks, according to investigators.