Police arrest 5 investment fraudsters
Almost 160 emergency services in four countries are deployed at the same time – with success: An international investigative team has arrested five main suspects for online investment fraud worth millions. “We have hit the management team hard,” said Manuel Recha from the public prosecutor’s office in Göttingen on Thursday. The years of investigations into the worldwide fraud system were controlled from Lower Saxony.
According to the police, there are more than 33,000 victims in 55 countries with damage of more than 89 million euros. For Germany, the investigators assume that more than 5,500 people have been affected and that the damage will be more than 22 million euros. At the end of March, the investigators struck at a so-called “Action Day” in Bulgaria, Romania, Georgia and Israel. Five men between the ages of 21 and 51 were arrested.
“We are cautiously confident that we can indict the accused before the end of this year,” said public prosecutor Recha at the presentation of the search success in Braunschweig. According to him, the suspects are two Israelis, two Romanians and one Bulgarian. The transfer to Germany should be completed in the coming week. The group is threatened with a process at the district court in Göttingen.
The fraudsters are said to have offered supposed business with financial transactions via various Internet platforms. Among other things, fake articles about celebrities who have already successfully invested are intended to attract victims. Potential investors are then fooled into investing in certain products such as oil, gold, silver or cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin.
Entry seems affordable at around 250 euros. The victims are given the illusion of a quick and high profit in order to persuade them to make further payments. Nothing happens when you want to pay out, the money has long since been transferred to various foreign accounts worldwide.
A man from Göttingen triggered the investigation in early 2020. He reported that about 250,000 euros had been stolen from him by investment fraudsters. Other cases quickly arose, for example in Braunschweig. The Cybercrime Commissariat there took over on behalf of the Göttingen public prosecutor’s office, which is the central office for Internet and computer crime.
According to police information, more than 100 officers were deployed in Bulgaria, the Netherlands, Ukraine, Cyprus and Israel in October 2021 during a first investigative strike in cooperation with Eurojust and Europol. A man was temporarily arrested. In the following months, the criminal structures and the individual acts could be further clarified, it is now said.
After the new manhunt coup, the investigators presented the extent of the global financial rip-off. They again cited Fx-leader.com as an example of such fraudulent websites. Overall, the investigators speak of a complex with corporate-like structures in which various criminal activities are intertwined. “One group offers money laundering, other perpetrators take care of the marketing strategy,” explained Mario Krause from the Cybercrime Commission in Braunschweig.
According to investigators, most of the victims come from Germany. There are also focal points in South Africa and Australia with thousands of people affected. Only a few are wealthy people who have lost large sums of money. 90 percent of the victims were therefore less than 5,000 euros.
Lower Saxony’s Interior Minister Daniela Behrens (SPD) spoke of an impressive investigation success. The operation shows that the police are able to use technology and experts to clear up such complexes across national borders.
