Eight men, suspected of being involved in a scam committed in December 2021 at the expense of a Parisian property developer for a record damage of 38 million euros, were arrested between June 2022 and January, according to the Paris prosecutor’s office, confirming sources familiar with the investigation.
Six of them, who participated in laundering the scam, were arrested in the Paris region in June 2022 and January 2023 and the other two were arrested in Israel in July 2022, as part of an investigation opened by the financial section of the National Jurisdiction for the Fight against Organized Crime (Junalco).
The people arrested in France, two of whom were arrested at the request of the Portuguese authorities, have been released without prosecution at this stage. Regarding the two arrests in Israel, no extradition request has been made at this stage, according to a source familiar with the matter.
A total of 3.9 million criminal assets, including 700,000 euros in cryptocurrency, were seized.
The modus operandi of the so-called “president scam” consists in usurping the identity of the manager of a company to convince an employee to make a false transfer order.
In December 2021, the accountant of the real estate developer Sefri-Cime, headquartered in Paris, receives a call from a scammer pretending to be a lawyer.
“He uses the pretext of a confidential operation to take over companies with the agreement of the president of the company”, explains Commissioner Vincent Kozierow, head of the Payment Fraud Brigade (BFMP) of the Paris judicial police, to AFP.
The accountant then receives an e-mail impersonating the CEO confirming that the operation is carried out at his request.
In total, more than 40 transfers will be made in a few weeks for a total amount of 38 million euros, a record in France.
The scam is eventually discovered and the company files a complaint.
At the same time, in Haute-Marne, a metallurgical company was also the victim of a “president’s scam” for a loss of 300,000 euros.
The gendarmes of the research section of Reims, in charge of this file, and the PJ of Paris understand very quickly, thanks to the exploitation of the telephone lines, that they are dealing with the same team.
Their two businesses are then united under the authority of Junalco.
The investigators, with the help of Europol, managed to trace the funds, which passed through various bank accounts opened under false identities and in the name of fictitious companies in Portugal, Spain, Hungary and Croatia in particular.