“Fraud is right now the biggest problem in the network, it is ruining thousands and thousands of people in Spain every year.”
Pedro Pacheco, Chief Commissioner of the Central Unit of Cybercrime of the National Police, warns it that way.
And he does it because dozens of cases pass by his desk, which could be added hundred more every day if everyone denounced.
But many times the embarrassment prevents it: “You have to be careful with the data that is given online and the purchases that are made with the card, we will not tire of repeating it. And you have to report, because if not, the crime is left
unpunished”.
Let’s go by parts.
What exactly does the Commissioner refer to when he talks about CiberFrauds?
“At all kinds of scams and timing on the Internet: shopping that never arrive, cloned web pages of others well known, whether tickets for theaters, cinemas or concerts, websites, computer products, which steal personal data,
You clon the phone card and credit card, travel that are paid and do not arrive, ghost rentals “.
That is, fraud has been established in the network as the main cybercrite.
So much so, that Pacheco affirms that “right now, fraud is already between 85% and 90% of known cybercrimes.”
The figure is worrisome not only because of its quantity, but because it does not stop climbing.
In 2018 it was 80%.
Arrived at this point, you have to forget hacakes to spy on large corporations or governments, set aside the past stories – although they still seem from the future – as that of Iran’s nuclear centrifuges, and consider that victims today
They are normal and current citizens.
They are those who buy everyday objects so that they are sent home, those who do not update the antivirus, those who rent an apartment for the holidays, look for their airline tickets on the Internet or carry out operations on the online banking.
That is, yourself.
Or his children.
And his neighbors.
All the world.
“A citizen today has more likely to be a victim of Internet fraud than to suffer a robbery or robbery at home,” said the Commissioner.
Every day, the investigators of the cybercrime constitute how the all-life criminals are disappearing, because those who were already destined for the crime almost before being born have realized that it is not the same to steal a bag of a jerk than to ride some
Tens or hundreds of euros online.
Nor is it the same to do with a pharmacy to offer on the web a rental floor for the summer holidays that is not even yours.
It is not the same for several reasons.
There is no risk of committing a crime in the physical world.
No alarms, there are no patrol cars, there are no victims who face the criminal.
And the main advantage is that there is either the same sentence for doing one thing than on the other.
While that does not change, a recycling of common criminals in little mountain hackers and cybers are occurring.
Today it is no longer difficult to learn a basic hacking or get a simple malware that does the job.
Therefore, many young people, according to experts, are happening to the cybercar.
Within this modality of fraud is sometimes some even more malicious in which the victims multiply, but that is also taking strength.
It is the scams related to mercenary hackers, such as the research closed this same summer by cybercrime agents.
On this occasion, after a long work, a hacker network was uncovered composed of five groups, especially seated in Canarias and Catalonia, whose members met the same pattern: they offered their services into very well-known social networks and websites, and
For a few hundred euros promised services such as installing spyware on mail accounts or phones.
That offer had a clear market, and with an authentic bombardment of advertisements (about 12,000, they have accounted for agents) caught rogue.
Other hacker groups were announced to offer tasks such as entering an institutional website to delete fines to a driver, when not as “hacker for everything”.
For the police part, a new task is increasingly important: cyberpatrullaje.
Tracking tools are used that permanently seek the crime on the network and through there come many new cases.
Without going any further, this last research of hackers.
Behind these thousands of advertisements found in cyberpatrulla there was actually hackstorsions, that is, the variant hacker of lifelong extortions, according to the investigation of the Police Open Networks section.
In Plan BLACK MIRROR, in cases of espionage to couples, the supposedly spiede received a notice of the hacker himself, which took money by saying that he had his photos, his entire private life, and that he would like it if he did not pay.
Many times it was not even true that he had that data with which he threatened, but only the phone number of him because he had given him who hired him.
But after, to that who requested the services of him the hacker also took money threatening himself with choking the victim.
In this way, the benefit obtained was finally double.
On other occasions, the scam was more classic: the hackers asked for money in advance and did not give signs of life again.
To fight against the CiberFraude, Commissioner Pedro Pacheco is clear that the first measure is the prevention that one could do: “Use prepaid cards, do not leave the data on any web, put complicated passwords and usually change them, do not put the whole life
From one on the networks, never put the data from a credit card on porn pages, have a good antivirus, do not prick suspicious links, either in the mail or in message applications “.
