Fight against financial crime: a Nigerian criminal organization dedicated to computer fraud using the BEC technique vanquished by the State Police 12 people reported for abusive access to a computer system and computer fraud
Following a complex investigative activity, coordinated by the Postal and Communications Police Service of Rome, the investigators of the Postal Police are carrying out home, personal and computer searches in various Italian cities against a criminal group composed of 12 Nigerian citizens.
The criminals were committed to carrying out next-generation BEC fraud (Busines e-mail compromise). This scam method provides abusive access to e-mails used by companies during commercial transactions, allowing fraudsters to spy on all correspondence between the companies being spied.
The Public Prosecutor's Office at the Court of Turin issued as many orders for personal, home and computer searches that were carried out by staff of the Postal Police in the cities of Turin, Genoa, Monza, Ferrara, Voghera (PV) and in province of Alessandria.
The investigation originates from the computer fraud reported last September by a company in the Treviso service sector for non-payment of some invoices issued to an Indonesian company. The defrauded sums, for an amount of about 155.000 euros, instead of ending up in the current account of the offended party, were diverted to current accounts opened specifically by the criminal association.
The deception, discovered by the specialists of the Treviso Postal Police, consisted in accessing a company e-mail address with sophisticated IT strategies and, after careful reprogramming of the settings by cyber criminals, these were replaced to the complainant company and, at the time of payment of the invoices, they invited the Indonesian commercial partner to make payments on bank current accounts specifically created to take possession of the "loot".
The complex investigative activities made it possible to reconstruct, in a painstaking way, the organization chart of the criminal organization that revolves around a Nigerian group gravitating in different parts of the country.
The commercial transactions and the capillary money-laundering network created to lose track of the sums illegally stolen have been reconstructed. The timeliness of the intervention also made it possible to block and recover sums of approximately 50.000 euros.
During the operation, numerous credit cards and cell phones used for the deception were seized and the evidence that emerged provided ample feedback to the investigative hypotheses, expanding the evidence against the suspects.