PESARO Bank accounts lightened with the QR Code trick: five on trial for quishing, the last frontier of fraud. The case ended up before the single judge and involves four young people from Torre del Greco and a man from Pesaro between 20 and 27 years old, all accused of aggravated fraud. Their victims are mainly people from Pesaro, in particular pensioners, aged 60 and over and all deceived with the same method. So much so that he managed to extract over 40 thousand euros in total in various transactions on several occasions. In some cases, however, the scam was only attempted because it was noticed at the last minute and the deception It has failed.
The technique is a more sophisticated and current variant of the more famous phishing, i.e. false email and warning messages with which one hopes to bait the unfortunate person in question. This is a scam that uses the QR Code, the code that allows you to quickly access multimedia content without the need to type the web address. In practice, the criminals sent a “bait” message from the bank reporting false access activities to the current account.
They then called the victim posing as bank officials saying they had detected an improper connection from a mobile phone to internet banking. With the latest IT systems it is possible to make money withdrawals at ATMs even without an ATM (cardless ed.). And here the QR code comes into play, the one that is generated to be able to withdraw the money. So the criminals were at the counter, they sent the QR code to the victim’s mobile phone and asked to scan it with the bank’s app so they could have the green light to withdraw money.
A very complicated mechanism for which multiple withdrawals are contested, even of 2500 euros at a time. The cyber criminals had also rented an apartment in Pesaro in 2022 where they had placed computers and equipment to facilitate the operations. There were those who pretended to be telephone operators, those who had the task of luring the victims and those who went to the ATMs to withdraw the money. The group of scammers has been discovered and now four of them are ready to face the abbreviated procedure, while one of them wants to plea bargain. Next hearing in October.
