CYBER criminals banked over €5 million by cloning websites selling high-end electrical products that customers never received.
Three people have been arrested in the Orihuela and Torrevieja areas of Alicante province with two others under investigation for fraud.
The Policia Nacional has not disclosed the nationalities or ages of the detainees.
Over 1,000 victims were conned in Spain and abroad by the gang who had over 100 bank accounts that were opened by using bogus documents.
Police seized over 100 credit cards in two house raids plus card recording devices and mobile phones.
The gang made copies of genuine websites of up-market electronic companies, which included using a similar domain web address to that of genuine firms.
The cyber experts managed to get preferential placements on internet search engines which were higher than legitimate businesses.
The products sold included phones and expensive electrical gear- offered at a slightly lower price than those on genuine sites to prevent people becoming suspicious that they were being conned.
If one of the gang’s websites was identified as fraudulent and shut down, they immediately created a new portal and regained their high rankings in the major search engines.
Customers never got their purchases or replies to their queries.
Once payments were received, they were converted into cryptocurrencies and transferred multiple times using what are known as ‘cold wallets’, to make it difficult to trace and identify the recipients.
