Italian, Romanian police break up cyber crime organisation

Romanian and Italian police – with the support of Europol, its Joint Task Force on computer crimes (J-CAT) and Eurojust – have arrested 20 suspected hackers in a series of coordinated raids on Wednesday. Nine people have been picked up in Romania and 11 in Italy.

The accused are wanted for bank fraud to the value of about 1 million euro carried out against hundreds of customers and two credit institutions. More than 100 agents were involved. The criminals used the technique of spear phishing, or sending fraudulent emails to targeted users with content that makes them appear to come from reliable sources. This encourages users to click on links that lead to false versions of websites, which they then try to access, thus providing their account data.

Specifically, the criminal organisation impersonated tax authorities to collect the online banking credentials of their victims.

The Italian-Romanian investigation, launched in 2016, revealed how cyber criminals used stolen online credentials to surreptitiously transfer money from the accounts of the victims to others under their control. From there, they collected money from ATMs in Romania with linked credit and debit cards. Moreover, they consolidated their power by intimidating affiliates and competitors.

Source: eu-ocs.com