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Canal+ Fraud Ring Busted: French Police Arrest Suspect Linked to Moroccan Hacking Network
Wednesday 7 June 2023, by
A young man in his twenties, suspected of being involved in a vast network of subscription fraud to encrypted television channels, was arrested by the research brigade of the Saint-Brieuc company. The head of the network resides in Morocco.
The young man was arrested on January 10, 2023 in a small house, in the commune of Plédran (22). Placed in custody, he admits to selling subscriptions to encrypted channels through fraud. The investigation was requested by the Canal+ channel in 2022, after one of its private investigators in charge of tracking down fraud, identified the site smart*.fr which, through advertisements on social networks (Telegram and Signal in particular), offers subscriptions to encrypted channels for around a hundred euros per year. The Canal+ investigator poses as a customer to obtain information that the channel then uses to file a complaint with the public prosecutor of Saint-Brieuc.
This is how the gendarmes, to whom the investigation was entrusted in September 2022, located the young man in Plédran. "We are working on a period from January 2021 to February 2023. Over this period, he makes 150,000 euros in sales," confides an investigator to the newspaper Le Télégramme. The gendarmes make another discovery. The suspect is not working alone. "At first, he was just a seller who reported to the head of the business: a Moroccan, who manages no less than 14 computer servers dedicated to the operation of the system. They recover the channels via the Emirates, for example, and divert them to Europe. Everything is done via the internet."
The suspect "was an administrator, so the right-hand man of the Moroccan boss, to whom he had to pay back a portion of the earnings. We really have a functioning similar to a drug trafficking process," adds the investigator, specifying that sixty resellers in France and abroad were working for the young man. The network has more than 7,000 customers who could also be prosecuted. In total, 26,000 euros in criminal assets, as well as phones, projectors, and other objects were seized. The suspect will be tried on October 16, 2023 for this fraud. The incriminated site, for its part, continues to function, under another name.