Scammers impersonate Europol officers, going for quantity over quality, exploiting a design flaw in telecoms infrastructure
ne recent summer afternoon, Christof Bock, a 38-year-old Berlin-based data engineer, picked up an incoming call from an unfamiliar number. Over a crackly line, he was informed in English that his ID and bank details had been found in a police raid in suburban Berlin, alongside 20lb of cocaine and paperwork showing transfers from his account to Colombia. To protect his savings, he was urged to transfer money from his bank account, and fast.
Criminal police offices in most of Germany’s 16 states would not disclose the sums the fraudsters have managed to trick citizens out of, but police in Bavaria, home to about 15% of the country’s overall population, said the sum of damages by 21 June in that state alone amounted to more than €2.5m. Bock pressed one and was put through to a real operator who informed him of the details of the apparent identity theft and immediately told him he would receive another call from a Europol investigator. The next call came from a Dutch number that a quick Google search seemed to confirm belonged to Europol.
Jan Op Gen Oorth, a Europol spokesperson, said: “Europol will never call you directly or ask people for money. “We are literally not in a legal position to do so.” With previous waves of scam calls, investigators were eventually able to identify the criminal networks behind them: earlier this year, German police arrested several members of a Polish gang of scammers who had specialised in defrauding elderly people by posing as their grandchildren over the phone.
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