AN INTERNATIONAL card-cloning racket has led to 38 arrests in Madrid and Andalucía after fraudulent payments of over €1.5 million were detected in the UK, Italy, Germany, USA and Australia.
The gang had set up a virtual travel agency as a front for laundering the cash, offering train and airline tickets, hotel bookings and car hire which they paid the service providers for using forged credit and debit cards.
Some of the providers were in cahoots with the suspects, earning commission from the payments made.
Among those arrested in the Greater Madrid region and in the provinces of Cádiz, Málaga – including the holiday hotspot, Marbella – Sevilla and Córdoba were 35 people who had managed to defraud the Social Security of €300,000 through a fake self-employed persons' cooperative which drew up forged employment contracts representing far greater levels of business activity than was truly the case, giving the 'employees' much more extensive rights than they would have obtained through their actual workload.
National Police picked up the scent after an undisclosed bank contacted them, and discovered that the card fraud alone exceeded €1.5m, with around 50 different 'doctored' card-reading units used to process the payments.
Among the heirarchy was one individual whose role was creating fake cards from real ones, another in charge of making the payments through the companies in on the racket, and an intermediary.
Cards cloned were based in the UK, Italy, Germany, the USA and Australia, and a haul of fake passports, job contracts, bank account books and various other business-related paperwork was seized during raids across the two regions.
Photograph by the National Police
AN INTERNATIONAL card-cloning racket has led to 38 arrests in Madrid and Andalucía after fraudulent payments of over €1.5 million were detected in the UK, Italy, Germany, USA and Australia.
The gang had set up a virtual travel agency as a front for laundering the cash, offering train and airline tickets, hotel bookings and car hire which they paid the service providers for using forged credit and debit cards.
Some of the providers were in cahoots with the suspects, earning commission from the payments made.
Among those arrested in the Greater Madrid region and in the provinces of Cádiz, Málaga – including the holiday hotspot, Marbella – Sevilla and Córdoba were 35 people who had managed to defraud the Social Security of €300,000 through a fake self-employed persons' cooperative which drew up forged employment contracts representing far greater levels of business activity than was truly the case, giving the 'employees' much more extensive rights than they would have obtained through their actual workload.
National Police picked up the scent after an undisclosed bank contacted them, and discovered that the card fraud alone exceeded €1.5m, with around 50 different 'doctored' card-reading units used to process the payments.
Among the heirarchy was one individual whose role was creating fake cards from real ones, another in charge of making the payments through the companies in on the racket, and an intermediary.
Cards cloned were based in the UK, Italy, Germany, the USA and Australia, and a haul of fake passports, job contracts, bank account books and various other business-related paperwork was seized during raids across the two regions.
