Main Suspect in Cyber Fraud Caught in Vienna

Over 50 servers were confiscated due to cyber fraud and 200 terabytes of digital evidence were secured, according to the European Police Office on Thursday. Europol described this as the "dismantling of a sophisticated criminal network" that enabled extensive online fraud activities.

Cyber Fraud: House Search and Arrest in Vienna

Searches took place in Germany and Vienna, and the infrastructure associated with a marketplace and fake shops was dismantled in Germany, Finland, the Netherlands, and Norway. The main suspects are a 27-year-old and a 37-year-old. They were "arrested in Germany or Austria on the basis of a European arrest warrant and are currently in pre-trial detention".

The arrest in Vienna was made in legal assistance for the German police leading the investigation. "A decision will be made in a procedure about a handover to the German authorities," said Judith Ziska from the Vienna Public Prosecutor's Office. The Federal Criminal Police Office (BK), the State Criminal Police Office, the Task Force for Combating Street Crime (EGS), a Europol officer, and two colleagues from the police in Hanover were involved in the operation in the federal capital, said BK spokesman Heinz Holub-Friedreich in response to APA inquiries.

The investigations were initiated in the autumn of 2022 by reports of fraudulent telephone calls. In these cases, fraudsters posed as bank employees to obtain sensitive information such as addresses and security answers from the victims. This stolen data was traced back to a specialised online marketplace that served as a hub for the trade in illegally obtained information.

Central Contact Point for Cyber Fraud

The marketplace allowed its thousands of users to buy stolen data, sorted by region and account balance. "This customisation enabled criminals to carry out targeted fraud more efficiently," analysed the experts from Europol. "With this insidious strategy, the operators maximised their revenues and created a system that facilitated other criminals' access to tailor-made data packages," said the Hanover Police Department. The sale and reuse of online banking and credit card data has so far caused total damage of over 250,000 euros to around 57 victims.

The investigators also uncovered a network of fake online shops that lured customers into entering payment information ("phishing"). The stolen login information was also sold via the marketplace. According to the investigators in Hanover, around 63,000 data records were captured via the deceptively real online platforms.

The operation was led by the Hanover Police Department and the Verden Public Prosecutor's Office in Germany, supported by law enforcement agencies across Europe. Europol and the European Cybercrime Centre (EC3) provided extensive resources and digital forensics to analyse and secure the complex evidence. Europol also dispatched a task force of data scientists, "who dealt with the processing and interpretation of huge amounts of data and thus uncovered important connections".

(APA/Red)

This article has been automatically translated, read the original article here.