The investigations began thanks to the complaint of a Milanese priest, harassed by calls from call centers who, with insistence and aggressive tones, asked him to pay unpaid bills relating to electricity and gas contracts he had never signed. The investigation, entrusted to the Operations Center for Cyber Security in Milan, made it possible to cover an impressive criminal system – made up of two Padua companies supplying electricity and gas and numerous call centers with offices in Italy and Albania – specialized in activations fraud of contracts for the supply of energy, extortion and self-laundering of illicit proceeds. There are thousands of people defrauded throughout Italy, especially in Lombardy.
The scams started from numerous and insistent phone calls (also made early in the morning and late in the evening) with which the data of the victims were collected, who were convinced they were talking to employees of the Regulatory Authority for Energy, Networks and the Environment, or companies energy companies with whom they had stipulated regular contracts for the supply of electricity and gas. The information was collected using pretexts such as, for example, phantom roadworks that had severed the electrical cables or gas pipes and due to which it was necessary to temporarily activate a new contract with an “agreed” operator.
These criminals, when they couldn’t persuade the victim, didn’t give up. They used the data acquired during the phone calls to still activate the contract by placing false signatures at the bottom of the paper documentation. In other cases, when the activation procedure required a voice recording, the victim’s voice, recorded during the phone call, was artfully manipulated with audio editors or artificial intelligence apps so that the necessary words could be heard pronounced by the unaware user. personal data and the various “yes” in response to the questions of the telephone operator responsible for collecting consent.
Only after a few months, the victims, completely unaware of having signed a contract with a new energy company, were sent huge payment reminders for unpaid bills. At that point the ordeal of countless phone calls began, with increasingly aggressive and intimidating tones, with which self-styled debt collectors requested payment of the outstanding amount. In several cases, the requests turned into real extortion. There was no shortage of threats either: “in the meantime we will weaken your electricity supply and, if you still don’t pay, we will cut off your power”. The tones of the phone calls were all the more aggressive, the more vulnerable the victims proved to be, among them, an elderly 87-year-old Venetian woman.
As the investigations took shape, the State Police operators managed to identify around a thousand victims who had not yet realized they had fallen into the trap. Many contributed to the successful outcome of the investigations, filing complaints or providing useful information for reconstructing the facts. The searches ordered by the Milan Prosecutor’s Office concerned a total of 35 targets, of which 32 in Italy and 3 in Albania, in Tirana. The target is two operational offices of the Padua energy companies (recently sanctioned by the Privacy Guarantor and the Antitrust Authority), 12 call center offices (of which 3 in Albania) and 21 subjects including administrators, accountants, consultants and employees of the energy companies and call centers.
During the searches, copies of the false contracts that were the subject of the complaint and the related voice recordings were found; furthermore, very up-to-date lists of residential users were found, to be contacted for the stipulation of electricity and gas contracts, so large as to require considerable IT resources for management and consultation. The profits are huge: the profits made in the first three months of 2023 alone amount to around 9 million euros.
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