Spanish Authorities Bust International Cybercrime Ring in Multi-Country Operation

The operation, carried out jointly by the Civil Guard, the Granada police, the prosecutor’s office and the cybercrime brigade of the Chilean investigative police, made it possible to dismantle this well-organized and dangerous criminal network composed of members located in Spain, the United States, Chile, Venezuela, Peru, the Czech Republic, Mexico and Morocco.

This criminal organization, "dangerous and efficient" according to the Civil Guard, has designed software to recover the credit card data of their victims in order to use them on online shopping platforms, or to sell them via a well-known application. Generally, the members of this network usurp the identity of real websites of national or international banking companies, or well-known multimedia streaming service companies, and recover the personal data of their victims as soon as they connect. They use various types of malware such as the Zeus banking Trojan and TinyBanker for this purpose.

More than 300 companies have been victims of this fraud by these cybercriminals who have managed to steal more than 42,000 credit cards in 47 countries, particularly in the United States and European Union countries.

After the arrest of the cybercriminals accused of aggravated fraud, membership in a criminal organization, identity theft and document forgery, several searches were carried out at their homes in Cadiz, Malaga and Santiago, Chile, which allowed the seizure of abundant documentation relating to the usurped payment identifiers, electronic storage devices, technological devices for the commission of crimes and cryptocurrencies.