The Supreme Court has confirmed the sentence to 10 months in prison against a fraudster, O., who made 345,675 calls to premium rate numbers between the night of Friday, September 7, 2012, and the morning of Monday, September 10, with the aim of collecting the 195,000 minutes it consumed. Of those 345,675 calls, 341,145 were made to three numbers (one 807 and two 905) owned by Ooiga, the defendant’s company. He had previously met with a Digi executive, the main affected, and discovered that the company was vulnerable to such an attack.
For all this, he used some 100 SIM cards that were previously purchased by 27 people in Romania and were recharged 1,268 times during the process. Despite the expense involved, he hoped to recover the investment with the 305,566.62 euros that he claimed from Digi, to whom the cascading bill arrived after a claim to Ono, which continued to Telefónica, from there to Jazztel and, finally, to Digi.
The amount could have been higher, but the company noticed this abnormal traffic and asked the CNMC to interrupt the traffic and withhold the associated charge. The entry of the body also led to the intervention of the Prosecutor’s Office, which appeared in the case (Telefónica and Digi itself did as well). An invoice created by a third entity led to another sentence, to eight months in prison, for the crime of falsifying a commercial document.
One of the keys to understanding the case is that, although the payment comes through the telephone bill, in reality who profits from the special or additional rate numbers -905, 803, 806, 807 or 118, recently indicated by the Government for being used to eat frauds- are the companies behind it.
The prefix indicates the type of activity to which these companies are engaged (803, for example, are services for adults and 806, entertainment), although in the case of the scam it was the least of it, since they did not even provide services professionals (the 807) nor were they used to carry out voting or collections (905, the same as those used a few months ago to choose the winner of the Benidorm Fest): their purpose was purely for collection purposes. In fact, the judgment also assumes that a device -a simbox, specifically- was used to automate the calls and make them simultaneously. A single person would have needed 135 days (four and a half months) to add up to 195,000 continuous minutes.
Although the case took place in September 2012, it is now when there is a final judgment from the Supreme Court, to which EL MUNDO has had access, against the defendant, who appealed the conviction for the crime of falsifying a commercial document and attempted credit fraud. the Provincial Court.
The first ruling considers it proven that the defendant met in September 2012 with at least one member of Digi’s board of directors and was interested in its operations. When the defendant asked if he had a fraud detection and alarm system installed, the manager told him that they only had an internal one, but not an external one, “at that time the defendant found out that the ‘Digimobil’ operator was vulnerable,” the report says. document. It is also noted that O. knew the sector and was dedicated, precisely, to computer security and fraud detection.
The appeal of cassation against his first sentence, in reality, focused more on formal reasons -violation of constitutional precept, infraction of law and breach of form- than on the merits of the matter. In either case, the statement disassembles the arguments one by one.
Thus, in the case of the violation of the right to the presumption of innocence, it argues that the circumstantial evidence is sufficient to conclude that the fraudster was the one who would benefit from the calls, despite the fact that a connection can be established between O. and the 27 people who purchased prepaid cards. The sentence, they point out, starts from an “essential” data: fraudulent call traffic was carried out “that generated a non-existent and artificial credit of which the only beneficiary was the defendant.” The Supreme Court also believes that there are indications to conclude that the defendant orchestrated the fraud, both because he knew how the market works and because everything happened after his conversation with the Digi executive who revealed that there was no fraud detection system. It also uses “the use of a false invoice” to claim the debt.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project