National Police Agents 35 people have been arrested in Valencia, as alleged perpetrators of 70 scams to people through the “son in trouble” modality with which they appropriated more than 217,000. They posed as the children of the victims through messaging and pretended that they were writing from a friend’s phone to request money after having suffered an emergency in circumstances in which they were incommunicado.
The investigations began at the beginning of 2023, when the agents, after receiving various complaints, began to take steps in order to identify the scammers. The investigators detected that all the victims were fathers or mothers and had received the same type of call in which they posed as their children.
During the call, they pretended to write from a friend’s phone and asked for urgent money to pay for another phone as they had suffered an emergency for which they were incommunicado. It was found out that, when the injured parties had already been deceived and agreed to make the payment, the fraudsters continued with the deception, giving them other pretexts to make more payments, which often reached very high amounts of money, as reported by the Police. National in a statement.
To obtain the benefits of the scams, the organization used “mules” that they recruited with different methods, sometimes in person in exchange for an amount of money and other times, through the web with supposed job offers. The recruiters, to make the offer more attractive to the “mules”, offered them a percentage of the money they obtained through the scams, which was around five to ten%.
The people who agreed to carry out this activity agreed to open bank accounts or provided their online account numbers and passwords to another member of the organization. Thus, they subsequently received the money from the injured party to dispose of it. With this method they complicated the possible tracking of the money in the event that they were investigated and made recovery difficult.
During the investigation, five capturers have been arrested, who were in charge of the money transferred to the accounts opened by the “mules” that they controlled. In addition, investigators have identified the alleged perpetrators of the frauds, linking up to 70 fraud crimes that had been reported throughout Spain. So far investigators have been able to trace several bank accounts and recover more than 25,000 euros that have been returned to the victims.
