A group of agents of the National Police has carried out a joint operation with the 'Polizia di Stato de Italy' and the Europol in which they have arrested 106 people in the south of Tenerife Island linked to the Italian mafia. The detainees have been accused of belonging to criminal organization, scam, drug trafficking, money laundering, kidnapping, falsification, injuries, threats, coercion, robberies with violence, stuffing, scam to social security and illicit holding of arms . And it was that they had bleached, allegedly, more than ten million euros in the last year, coming from computer scams carried out throughout Europe.
The investigations began in June 2020 by the National Police, when it was detected that a group of people linked on the island was seated with different Italian mafia, whose mission was to whiten the money obtained through multiple computer crimes committed in Spain, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Lithuania and the United Kingdom.
The organization had a high degree of technification, which allowed it to cover different computing fraud modalities: 'Phishing', 'Smishing', 'Visthing', 'SIM swapping', CEO fraud and 'hackeos' to commercial companies. All this reported the group enhanced income amounts, specifically more than ten million euros in a single year of research. That money, once received in controlled bank accounts, was bleached through its companies or in cryptoactive, for, subsequently, to be reported to the mafial organizations. Therefore, 118 bank accounts have been blocked to date.
The members of the dome of this criminal organization were erected as an authentic delinquency pyramid structure, and directed a whole network of collectors and hundreds of financial intermediaries, known as "mules", which, although they were positioned in the lowest places of the Organization, they were an indispensable link in the complex gear of money laundering.
This group of criminals had managed to settle and introduce themselves into different sectors of society: business framework, law offices and banking entities, among others.
This level of settlement not only provided the organization impunity for money laundering, but also for the different criminal activities typical of these mafia groups carried out in Spain. Police investigations allowed corroborate, among these activities, prostitution, collection of weapons, drug trafficking, kidnapping, scam, identity usurpation, documentary falseness, crimes against social security, strokes with force and violence, injuries and even involvement Of several of its members in two homicides carried out on the island.
The amount of money they obtained was so raised that they handled hundreds of bank accounts that opened and closed continually, arriving on a occasion to kidnap a woman and, after threatening her at a gunpoint, take her to an ATM to steal all the money and Open 50 online bank accounts for the organization. Once they are detained, they threatened the victim and the environment of her to prevent them from testifying against her.
The extreme violence of this group was also manifested in other criminal actions. They gave palisas, they stolen in establishments and extorted both members of the organization that separated from internal standards as other people or tiner companies that, for fear of reprisals, did not report, which confers an important degree of impunity.
The entrances and records carried out by the agents provided data that demonstrated the involvement of those investigated in the numerous criminal illicit, including drug trafficking, since it was possible to detect a marijuana plantation composed of more than 400 plants and a processing center of The Full Melt or Iceolator, consisting of the filtering of the leaves of marijuana along with water and ice in order to increase its effects, as it is much more powerful due to the increase of the Active Principle THC.
On the other hand, the realization of new scams already prepared has been avoided, unchangeable in a single record more than 80 telephony cards arranged for the realization of SIM swapping and VISHING crimes, obtaining data on numerous victims of computer scams. For the mafia this mode of financing was so important that sent from Italy to fugitive members of Italian justice to control its financing activities and supervise, thus, obtaining and sending money.
Two of the detainees were valid European detention orders for 20 years in prison for drug trafficking, robberies with violence and strokes. Once settled in Spain, they continued to live thanks to the crime, taking into force, equally, detention orders.
It was also common for a member of the Napolitan Mafious Dome to travel to Tenerife to control the operations that were carried out. Each time this occurred, those researched in the Canary Islands prepared all coverage and security measures to avoid the detection of this person in Spain, although police investigations allowed him to identify and stop him in Italy through a European detention order. The security measures adopted by these fugitives, knowledgeable of their situation and their contacts, as well as the police pressure, caused the operational exploitation, once the agents confirmed that they were in possession of false documentation and that they programmed their Leakage from Spain.
For this, the police device was designed, planned and coordinated from the island of Tenerife, taking 18 entries and records and proceeding to a total of 106 arrests. To carry out the police deployment, a single control center was established located in Santa Cruz de Tenerife, from which a police device distributed in three operational phases was coordinated and led.
During the operation, agents have intervened an electric discharge device, 12,615 euros, 402 marijuana plants in different degrees of development, two scales of precision weighing, marijuana cultivation material, material for dose distribution of cannabis, 118 Blocked bank accounts, 224 bank cards and numerous computer equipment, among other purposes.
Date Of Update: 22 September 2021, 11:03
