The complaint was made by a priest from Milan. After the last, yet another, harassing phone call from a call center whose operators often even used threatening tones. It is from there, from the headquarters of the Madonnina postal police, that the police traced back to a criminal network with ramifications in Veneto, Campania, Sicily and even abroad, i.e. in Albania. Code name: Energy switch operation, because everything, absolutely everything, revolved around the world of bills.
Electricity and gas and a huge billion-dollar scam (which in fact brought in something like nine million euros in the first three months of 2023 alone). The victims, there are over a thousand, were contacted and accused of not having paid what had previously been agreed. Small detail, however: not even a shadow of contracts stipulated that would have forced them to open their wallets. Yet, thanks to artificial intelligence, the criminals managed to make them believe otherwise. Algorithms and a few clicks on the computer, nowadays very little is needed.
The game was simple: the cyber criminals, using AI, extrapolated the real voice of the customer from a conversation, then manipulated it and inserted it into artificial recordings until it appeared that yes, indeed a supply service for a user domestic service had been requested and, in this way, they induced naive or not (falling into these traps has unfortunately become very easy) to shell out substantial sums.
The calls always came in the early hours of the morning or late in the evening. To an 87-year-old lady who had just returned from a long stay in hospital (the preferred target was that of fragile subjects) they even said: “In the meantime, we’ll reduce the power, if you don’t pay we’ll cut it off.” To defeat the entire gang, the authorities had to carry out 35 searches (three of which in Tirana) in two energy companies in the Padua area, which were also recently sanctioned by the Privacy Guarantor and the Antitrust.
Twelve call center locations and 21 subjects were involved in the operation, including administrators, accountants, consultants and employees: in one of the call centers that were searched, copies of the fraudulent contracts with the related voice recordings turned up, as well as very long lists of users still to be contacted. Or, better yet, to be scammed. Luckily for them the officers arrived first.
