This is an email that you may have received like some members of the Digital, Besides. Resembling an official court document, it looks like a court summons explaining that you have viewed child pornography and that an investigation is underway against you. Obviously false, the document is used to make panicked recipients pay fines.
According to our colleagues from RTL, close cooperation between the police and the gendarmerie led to the arrest of 19 people this week. It took two years for investigators from the judicial police of the OCLCTIC (Central Office for the Fight against Cybercrime), the gendarmes of the Versailles Research Section, the Nice Research Brigade and CyberGend to carry out the investigation. . Those arrested were arrested in France and Belgium, and their police custody ended on Thursday June 22, pending their summons for various hearings at the end of the year. They risk up to 10 years in prison.
With this scam, the defendants would have managed to extract more than 3.3 million euros from their victims, which for the moment only includes those who have filed a complaint. Still according to our colleagues, the Pharos platform received 150,000 reports and more than 300 complaints were filed with the authorities. In the end, the investigators identified several small networks using the same modus operandi.
The case is not trivial. In particular, six investigations were opened after the suicide of victims of these scams, mainly aged over 60 and “for whom technology remains something that is difficult to understand”, according to investigators. The authorities specify on this subject that a judicial summons is never made by e-mail, and even less with the payment of a fine against the abandonment of the proceedings.