The members of a gang operated in the Spanish island of Mallorca following the recipe of the well-known Israeli scammer Simon Leviev, whose victims tell their stories in the Netflix documentary “The Tinder Swindler”.
They thus managed to cheat online at least 20 women, including from Romania. The victims sent them considerable sums of money, believing that they were helping the men who claimed to be in love with them.
On Thursday, the Spanish police dismantled the online fraud network, which functioned as a dating site and through which numerous victims in Europe were defrauded of a total amount of over 1 million euros, reports the dpa agency.
The suspects used fake virtual profiles to establish online relationships with women and gain their trust, after which they asked them to transfer money to them under the pretext of emergency situations.
The investigation started from a case in the Spanish city of Alicante (east), where a victim chatted online for days with an alleged American soldier who, using the image of a handsome actor, repeatedly asked and obtained money from him – in total no less than 835,000 euros.
A police spokesman said it was “one of the largest online crime operations in the EU”. 16 people were arrested in total, 15 of them in Mallorca, including the leader of the network, a 27-year-old Nigerian, the police said.
At least 20 victims were identified, mostly single women from Germany, Italy, Spain, Finland, Luxembourg, Poland, Lithuania, Romania, Croatia, Slovakia and other countries.
The money obtained was transferred to accounts in countries such as Indonesia and Malaysia, sometimes being invested in bitcoins.