The State Police has referred a thirty-year-old from Campania to the Judicial Authority, seriously suspected of the crime of receiving stolen goods. The arrest resulted from an investigation launched following the complaint of a seventy-seven year old, victim of an increasingly widespread telephone scam based on the sending of fake banking SMS. The investigative activity, conducted by the Operational Section for Cyber Security of Crotone and coordinated by the Public Prosecutor’s Office of Benevento, started from the complaint presented by the elderly man.
The dynamics of the scam
The latter had received a message microscopically or apparently coming from a well-known electronic payment circuit, in which he was asked to authorize a payment or, alternatively, to contact customer service to deny the operation. The unfortunate person, unaware of the scam, contacted the fake helpline number. The so-called operator, leveraging a sense of urgency and fear, managed to convince him to go to his bank and make a transfer of 14,800 euros, passed off as a necessary operation to stop the alleged fraud. To make the deception more credible, the scammers also initiated contact via WhatsApp via an official-looking profile, through which the payment receipt was requested.
The recovery of the sums and the identification of the suspect
Thanks to specific technical skills, the Postal Police investigators managed to reconstruct the financial flows, identify the recipient current account and arrange for it to be frozen, thus seizing the sums for justice purposes. The operation allowed the full recovery of the 14,800 euros and made it possible to identify the account holder, a thirty-year-old from Campania with specific criminal records.