An ongoing internet fraud scheme conducted by several networks of organised cyber criminals in Romania and the United States has been disrupted, the US Department of Justice says, as a result of a series of law enforcement actions coordinated since 2010 between Romanian and US law enforcement, including numerous arrests and searches in Romania.
More than 100 individuals have been arrested and charged in Romania and judicial districts in the United States as a result of close cooperation between the Romanian General Inspectorate of Police, Directorate for Combating Organized Crime, the Romanian Directorate for Investigating Infractions of Organised Crime and Terrorism (DIICOT), the Romanian Intelligence Service (SRI), the General Directorate of Jandarmeria in Romania (GIJR) and the FBI, the US Secret Service, the Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section (CCIPS) in the Justice Departmentโs Criminal Division, and the U.S. Attorneysโ Offices for the Southern District of Florida, the Western District of Pennsylvania and the Eastern District of Missouri.
Romania law enforcement executed 117 searches targeting more than 100 individuals allegedly involved in the fraudulent scheme involving fake sales of merchandise through the Internet. Romanian law enforcement targeted individuals organizing and perpetrating this fraud from Romania.
According to US court documents, in many of the cases, conspirators located in Romania would post items for sale such as cars, motorcycles and boats on Internet auction and online websites. They would instruct victims located in the United States and elsewhere who wanted to buy those items to wire transfer the purchase money to a fictitious name they claimed to be an employee of an escrow company. Once the victim wired the funds, the co-conspirators in Romania would text information about the wire transfer to co-conspirators in the United States known as โarrowsโ to enable them to retrieve the wired funds. They would also provide the arrows with instructions as to where to send the funds after retrieval. The arrows in the United States would go to money transmitter service counters such as Western Union or MoneyGram International, provide false documents including passports and driversโ licenses in the name of the recipient of the wire transfer, and obtain the funds. They would subsequently wire the funds overseas, typically to individuals in Romania, minus a percentage kept for their commissions. In some cases, co-conspirators in Romania also directed arrows to provide bank accounts in the United States where larger amounts of funds could be wired by victims of the fraud. The victims would not receive the items they believed they were purchasing.
