A call center dismantled in Alicante that has potentially defrauded more than 2 million Euros

Policía Nacional have dismantled a call center in Alicante from where different types of extortion were carried out, such as hitman scam and son in trouble fraud. 73 people have been arrested who were part of the criminal organization, who acted as recruiters, extractors, “mules” and “voices”.

In the police operation, a total of 22 simultaneous raids were carried out in Valencia, Barcelona and Alicante, in which around 250,000 euros, firearms and machetes were seized, and 129 bank accounts, three homes and more than 20 vehicles were blocked. The agents found a call center operating 24 hours a day located in a house in the town of Benissa (Alicante) from where they carried out all the logistical activity. There were a lot of telephones,  electronic devices and seven people working inside, including the leader of the organization.

The hitman scam procedure consisted of placing ads on contact pages advertising sexual services with fake ads of women using images they obtained from open sources through the Internet. The ads contained sensual and attractive messages to attract clients by offering a telephone number of the supposed girl. Once the first contact was established, they obtained the phone number with which they subsequently threatened the victims with extreme intimidation by sending very violent images, demanding payments both by wire transfer and instant payment systems.

Police investigators discovered that they were also committing the son in trouble fraud scam on a massive scale. With this method they pretended to be the children of the victims, through messaging, pretending to be writing from a friend's phone to request money urgently because they had suffered an emergency and were incommunicado.

It is estimated that there could be more than 2,000 victims affected based on the complaints received, and that the fraudsters could have obtained more than 2 million euros.