The Civil Guard has dismantled a criminal organization for defrauding 44 people in the province of Granada of a total of 180,000 euros using the false son in trouble technique.
“Hello mom. My cell phone is broken. I have a temporary number. I can’t call you. You can send me an SMS through WhatsApp to number 656…” is the message that the victims received on their cell phones from the alleged scammer posing as their son.
In this way he convinced himself that he had financial problems and urgently needed money. The victim made one or more transfers to whom she believed to be her son and later she discovered that she had been scammed.
In total, the Civil Guard has arrested eight people as alleged perpetrators of serious fraud crimes. The detainees are responsible for recruiting people around them throughout the national territory so that they open bank accounts and give them the access codes, they are responsible for paying for these accounts and in turn give them to the final masterminds of the scams.
32 more people have also been investigated as mules, people who in exchange for money registered numerous bank accounts in their names, verified with video calls and photographs of their ID, and gave them to the detainees to obtain the financial benefit of the scams. . Those investigated are allegedly responsible for supporting money laundering from swindled money.
This operation called ‘Munkid’ began after both the investigators of the Technological Crimes Team and the Civil Guard Team in Granada detected that throughout 2023 multiple scams had been committed in the province of Granada with the same modus operandi: the fake son who asks his parents for urgent money via mobile messaging.
The agents found out that the money from one of these scams ended up in a bank account of a person residing in the Jaen town of Pegalajar. They also discovered that the owner of these accounts was a 23-year-old woman who was in charge of recruiting mules to register bank accounts and give her the passwords. She, in turn, made all these accounts available to a higher echelon.
As part of that upper echelon, a 24-year-old man has been arrested in the Sevillian town of Pedrera. This young man was in charge of recruiting people like the young woman detained in Jaén, making payments and transferring the accounts obtained to another man, direct contact with the masterminds of the scams.
After the arrest of these first two people, the Civil Guard managed to identify and arrest six other people involved in capturing mules, in addition to investigating 32 people for giving up their bank accounts and collaborating with the organization in exchange for money.
The arrests and investigations have been carried out in the provinces of Jaén, Seville, Málaga, Huelva, Córdoba, Alicante, Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Albacete, Guadalajara, Barcelona, ??Girona, Lleida, Valladolid, Huesca and Zaragoza.
