Fraudsters from the Czech-Ukrainian gang used the numbers of real CNB employees or police officers

This is exactly the modus operandi used by the Czech-Ukrainian gang, which was recently arrested by the police in Odessa, Ukraine. He is responsible for hundreds of frauds with damages of several tens of millions of crowns.

The legend with which they deceived the clients of Czech banks was simple. They pretended to be employees of the Czech National Bank.

“Thus they gained credibility. They also used an app that made it look like the caller was really from the bank or the police. But if people entered a callback on their phone for verification, they wouldn’t claim. If they dialed the number, it would be picked up by real bank employees or the police. We have indeed recorded such cases,” police spokeswoman Iva Kormošová told Novinka, adding that the fraudsters also did not force the victims to directly withdraw money from the account. They requested a transfer to the account or permission to remotely manage the account.

“People between the ages of twenty and seventy were defrauded. And there were days when we recorded three cases a day,” the spokeswoman noted. The fake bankers often recorded the fact that they hit the moment when he was called in a certain pressure.

“The damage themselves said they wouldn’t normally do that. But the phone call caught them, for example, at work, when they were solving something, when they were in a hurry or when they were in the store,” Kormošová listed. Victims were told that they had to transfer their savings to a so-called rescue account.

Fake bankers in handcuffs this time. The police arrested dozens of suspects in the Czech Republic and Ukraine

Crime stories

“In some cases, they tricked victims into installing a remote administration program, thereby gaining unrestricted access to their online banking. Deceived persons thus lost not only their savings, but also the money from the loans, which they seemed to have applied for themselves. The money from the account of the injured persons was mostly transferred to the accounts of mainly Ukrainian citizens living in the Czech Republic, who in turn withdrew the money from ATMs and handed it over to other persons,” said Iva Kormošová.

So people today have to repay loans, of which they have never seen a penny.

“It is their fault that they made their account available to other people. The fraud would not have occurred without the involvement of the injured party. They themselves revealed, for example, the PIN code or the bank key,” the spokeswoman explained.

The Czech-Ukrainian crackdown on a fake call center is an extraordinary success. While the number of trusted people who have been robbed continues to increase despite numerous warnings, the success rate of detecting fraudsters is low.

Twenty-three Czechs and seventeen Ukrainians were detained in the Czech Republic and Ukraine, including six Czech operators, who are now awaiting extradition and will not be charged until they arrive in their homeland. The police spokeswoman did not want to say whether they knew that they were committing a crime.

“Other operators were detained in the Czech Republic. I don’t know if they were on vacation or if they were done with it. A recruiter from Náchodsk, who started out as a recruiter, also ended up in custody,” added Kormošová.

“She placed job advertisements, communicated with interested parties, then trained them and ensured their departure to Ukraine. Operators earned an average of eighty to two hundred thousand crowns per month. According to their skills,” the spokeswoman said and added.

“So far, the police officers have proven to the group that it has committed more than 150 acts during the year from October 2022 with a damage of almost 30 million, of which over 22 million is the damage done. However, we assume that there may be several hundred more frauds. It is possible to trace from which call center the call was made. Therefore, the investigation is still ongoing.”

Currently, the file already contains over 20,000 sheets and around 1 TB of data.

From one hundred crowns to one thousand. The fake Havlíček promises the impossible, then kills the gullible

Safety