The police in France and Belgium said they had detained 19 members of criminal gangs in extortion scam that sent victims phoney court summonses accusing them of viewing photographs of children being sexually abused. These people were accused of viewing images of children being molested online.
The recipients of the communications were duped into thinking they owed thousands of dollars in fines and threatened with legal action if they did not comply with the demands.
At least one of the victims took his own life.
The con had already taken advantage of the victim twice, first conning him out of 5,978 euros and then forcing him to fork over 7,480 euros more.
Colonel Thomas Andreu, who is in charge of one of the specialized police teams in France, stated that the amounts that were taken from victims were frequently substantially higher, reaching up to €200,000 in some instances.
“We thought that the fraud was being run by one central structure,” stated Colonel Andreu. “However, it turned out to be a number of different small teams that were not connected to one another.”
On Monday, eighteen people were taken into custody in France, and one person was taken into custody in Belgium. Everyone’s age ranged from 20 to 50 years old.
On fraud accusations, all accused, with the exception of three, were ordered to appear in court.
After the scam was discovered to have begun in 2021, the Paris prosecutor’s office initiated an investigation into the matter. By June of the following year, there had been a total of four hundred complaints lodged about it.
The authorities are still trying to determine how many people were affected by this incident, and they believe that six further persons who were targeted may have also taken their own lives.
The con artists who perpetrated the fraud spent part of the money that they stole in France, but the vast majority of it was wired to the Ivory Coast as well as to other African nations.
