It all started with a complaint from a Milanese priest. The man, harassed by phone calls from a call center, where the tones became more and more threatening day by day, turned to the police. The reason for the phone calls? The request for payment of unpaid bills relating to electricity and gas contracts he never signed.
Operation Energy Switch
At this point the case was passed to the Operations Center for Cyber Security in Milan, which discovered the existence of a massive 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. Hence, the name of the operation: Energy Switch.
The investigation – which led to local and IT searches and involved a total of 35 targets, of which 32 in Italy and 3 in Albania – was conducted by the Milan Postal Police under the guidance of the Milanese Public Prosecutor’s Office and the Special Prosecutor’s Office against Corruption and Organized Crime in Tirana.
The phases of the scam
The scams carried out by the suspects began with numerous and insistent phone calls, which were also made late in the evening or very early in the morning. The victims believed they were speaking with employees of ARERA (Regulatory Authority for Energy, Networks and the Environment) or with employees of the energy companies with which they had actually signed contracts. During these phone calls victim data was collected in various ways. The most used pretext was that of phantom roadworks that had severed the electrical cables or gas pipes, which is why it was necessary to temporarily activate a new contract with an “agreed” operator.
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AI at the service of crime
In cases where activation required a voice recording, the victim’s voice, recorded during the phone call, was manipulated with audio editors or artificial intelligence applicationsso that the necessary personal data and the various “yes” in response to the questions of the telephone operator in charge of collecting consent could be heard.
Only after a few months, the victims, completely unaware of the scam and of having changed energy supplier, received payment reminders for unpaid bills of very high amounts. At this point, the ordeal of phone calls began where real debt collectors also threatened to make payment. “If you don’t pay, we’ll cut off your electricity” was the most common extortion phrase, and the more defenseless the victim appeared, the more aggressive the tone.
A hard blow to wild telemarketing
The investigations led to the analysis of a large amount of electronic and banking data, which led to the discovery of around a thousand victims, many of whom had not yet realized they had ended up trapped. 21 subjects searched among administrators, accountants, consultants and employees of the Padua energy companies (recently sanctioned by the Privacy and Antitrust Guarantor) and call centers.
In the first three months of 2023, the profits made thanks to this activity amount to 9 million euros. A swirling round of money, which the joint operation of Italian and Albanian investigators has put a stop to. Seizures of computer systems, remote servers, cloud spaces and specialist technological equipment have dealt a severe blow to the telemarketing phenomenon.
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