New operation by the State Police in the field of combating financial cybercrime. The Financial Cybercrime Section of the Postal Police of Naples, under the direction of the Neapolitan Prosecutor's Office and in collaboration with colleagues from the Turin Postal Police, has closed the circle around two dangerous cyber fraudsters, Nigerian citizens resident in our country, responsible for a sophisticated computer fraud known as BEC (Business Email Compromise). This particular form of technological-financial crime, now known on the international scene, is characterized by the interception of telematic communications (mainly via e-mail) between two commercial partners (e.g. between supplier and customer), thanks to which skilled cyber criminals, stealing digital identities and through false e-mail addresses, deceitfully appropriate significant sums of money, often bringing businesses, especially medium and small, victims of the crime to their knees.
The fraud described is often successful, because the criminals, thanks to the violation of computer spaces, are able to study the victim, acquiring a vast and detailed wealth of information, spying on their habits, observing the nature of the personal and commercial information they maintain, and illicitly acquiring their most confidential data. The picture is completed by the use of the sneaky technique of so-called email spoofing, that is, the activation, through specific software, of an email address that is apparently identical to the real one, through which the hackers contact the final victim of the fraud (i.e. the business partner), tricking them into making very large payments, under the pretext of having to pay commercial invoices.
Believing that the circumstance discourages or makes it impossible for the police to take action, the fraudulent payments are then diverted to current accounts in the name of money mules, money couriers recruited by criminal organizations with the task of unpacking and laundering illicit profits abroad. The investigations of the Postal Police of Naples began with the complaint filed by the CEO of a Campania company operating in the industrial gas marketing sector, who had suddenly noticed that a transfer of € 236.000,00, arranged from his current account to settle a commercial invoice, had not reached the real beneficiary, but rather a different account, communicated to him with an email sent by cyber criminals who had impersonated the real business partner.
The complex technological and financial investigations carried out by the Postal Police led the investigators to a branch of Poste Italiane in Turin, where a current account had been opened in the name of a Nigerian citizen, resident in the Piedmont capital. From there, the money was then immediately transferred by the fraudsters to an account in the name of the same Nigerian citizen, and then to a different payment card attributable to a woman, also of Nigerian nationality and resident in Turin. Immediately after receiving the complaint, the Postal Police of Naples seized all the aforementioned current accounts, managing to recover a large part of the sum stolen by the fraudsters. Subsequently, at the end of the investigations, colleagues from the Postal Police of Turin, where the traces led, were promptly activated, who carried out a search of the two Nigerian citizens, finding in their possession all the current accounts used to launder the money proceeds of the crime.
EDITORIAL TEAM
Choose the social channel you want to subscribe to