Public Prosecutor's Office of Faro accuses 71 people of online banking fraud
The Public Prosecutor's Office (MP) of Faro accused 71 people of the crimes of computer forgery, money laundering and criminal association, some of whom belong to the Brazilian criminal organization Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC), it was announced today.
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País PCC
According to a note published on the website of the Regional Attorney General's Office of Évora, the defendants, of Portuguese and Brazilian nationalities, but also from African countries, were dedicated to capturing data and access codes to bank accounts, which they accessed and subtracted money from.
According to the Public Ministry, the defendants acted by the method known as 'phishing', by creating a fake page identical to that of the banking institutions, to convince the victims that they were accessing the real portals of their banks and there inserting the access credentials to the accounts.
In possession of the data, the criminals entered the victim's bank account through the bank's real page and scheduled a monetary transfer to a bank account of another element linked to the organization, the Public Ministry details.
Later, he adds, pretending to be a bank employee, they called the victim to inform them that they had detected a false banking operation, and that to cancel it they needed the code that the bank would send them to their mobile phone.
The defendants then created a second page where they mirrored the fraudulent operation, which the victim accessed, already convinced that they were real bank employees and that they wanted to cancel the transfer.
As the defendants remained on the phone with the victim, the victim told them the code that allowed them to validate the bank transfer operation, then circulating the money through several bank accounts between Portugal and Brazil, in order to be laundered, reads the note.
For the Public Ministry, the success of the crime is related to the speed with which the computer operations were executed, through computers that may be housed in a third country and the credibility that the defendants transmitted in dialogue with the victim.
According to the Public Prosecutor's Office, it is a well-structured organization, where the defendants have specific functions, namely those who dealt with the computer part, those who called the victims and those who made the bank accounts available in order to circulate the money.
The accusation against the 71 defendants was brought on April 22 by the director of the Department of Investigation and Criminal Prosecution (DIAP) of the district of Faro, in an investigation carried out by the Judiciary Police.
Read Also: PSP arrests two men for fraud with "black euros" in Lisbon (Portuguese version)
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