Highly professional, deceptively real and really criminal: A network of fraudsters robbed gullible investors of millions. Two men from the gang are now on trial in Nuremberg.
Nuremberg (dpa / lby) – Two members of an internationally active and highly professional gang of fraudsters have to answer before the Nuremberg-Fürth district court from today (9:00 a.m.). The two 28 and 31-year-old men are said to have brought investors in German-speaking countries well over 23 million euros as part of a globally organized fraud network. The Cybercrime Central Office, based at the Bamberg Public Prosecutor’s Office, accuses the men of gang and commercial fraud as ringleaders.
According to the public prosecutor, the accused are not the heads of the entire network, but are leaders who played a central role in dealing with the victims. The process is scheduled to last 20 days until the end of January 2023.
The network with dozens of members created lucrative investment offers on online platforms. Investors sometimes transferred six-digit amounts in the hope of good returns. During the alleged investments, they were apparently looked after professionally – by call centers that maintained their own desks in the language of the victims. The German desk was initially in Tel Aviv, later in Sofia. The victims never saw the money they allegedly invested again. Instead, it flowed into the scammers’ pockets through a complex web of accounts and shell companies.
The two men, along with other suspected perpetrators, were arrested in the Bulgarian capital Sofia in 2021 and extradited to Germany. According to the public prosecutor, two accomplices were sentenced to several years in prison in two separate trials in May and August.