The policemen of the Cyber Security Operations Center in Milan, in collaboration with similar specialists from the Albanian Police, have discovered the existence of 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 fraudulent activation of contracts for the supply of energy, extortion and self-laundering of illicit proceeds.
The investigations began after the complaint of a Milanese priest, harassed by calls from call centers which, with insistence and aggressive tones, asked him to pay unpaid bills relating to electricity and gas contracts he had never signed.
The victims of the scam turned out to be more than a thousand.
The scammers’ modus operandi was always the same, the victims’ data was collected using pretexts such as, for example, phantom roadworks that had severed the electricity cables or gas pipes and due to which it was necessary to temporarily activate a new contract with a “agreed” operator.
When users were not persuaded, supply contracts were still signed by falsifying the signatures on 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.
The local and computer searches carried out by the agents involved a total of 35 targets, of which 32 in Italy and 3 in Albania, in the city of Tirana, and 21 people including administrators, accountants, consultants and employees of energy and call center companies.
The profits made from scams in the first three months of 2023 amount to approximately 9 million euros.
The phases of the police operation carried out in Albanian territory made use of the collaboration of the Service for International Police Cooperation and the Office of the Expert for Security in Albania of the Central Directorate of the Criminal Police.
