Moroccan Police Investigate Massive Call Center Fraud Ring Spanning Multiple Cities

About a hundred individuals are under judicial investigation in several cities in Morocco. These managers and employees of fictitious call centers would be operating without legal authorizations. But they are also accused of theft, transfer and telephone call hacking.

Their modus operandi is simple but criminal. Indeed, the General Directorate of National Security indicates that "they call several victims from a number registered abroad with just one ring to push the victim to call back before transferring their call to a fictitious call center that extends the duration of the communication". This procedure, observes the DGSN, consists in "exhausting the balance and making the national telecommunications company that received the suspicious rings pay the costs of calls in foreign currency". In short, a criminal procedure of the defendants which has already caused more than two million dirhams in losses to their victims.

By conducting searches in the call centers in question, the judicial police services of the cities concerned were able to seize a large batch of "computer equipment including computers, call devices and international communication transfer mechanisms, suspected of being used for criminal purposes".

The police will try to determine the "criminal acts" attributed to the suspects, as well as the "ramifications of these activities, both nationally and internationally", in order to make arrests.