Jordi Arias Fernandez, aka
Lupin
, lived on the night of last Saturday, January 8, his last spree in freedom. At least for now. This 25-year-old man from León spent the whole morning with friends in a private room at the Shoko nightclub, in the center of Madrid. At the exit, the National Police was waiting for him to arrest him and take him before the judge by court order. A customer of the establishment had recognized him because he had recently seen his face on a television program that detailed his whereabouts and alerted the agents. This is how the person considered to be the biggest cyber-fraudster in Spain fell again, who allegedly pocketed up to 300,000 euros a month with his fraudulent internet sales. The Civil Guard has up to 400 complaints throughout Spain that are now being investigated in a single case by the judge of the National High Court Ismael Moreno,According to sources close to that investigation, which is still open.
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Arrested the biggest cyber-fraudster in Spain when he was preparing a hit of one million euros
When he was arrested, Lupine was carrying €12,000 in cash.
He maintained the high standard of living in which he had settled since at least five years ago he allegedly began his false sales of electronic products through web pages.
The reserved in which he lived his last party costs a minimum of 300 euros.
When they put the handcuffs on him, he immediately applied for
habeas corpus
, a legal figure by which he asked to appear before the judge immediately so that he could determine if the detention was legal.
It was.
The head of the Court of Instruction 3 of Madrid, at that time on duty, found that nine legal claims weighed on him for alleged fraud crimes issued by courts in Ponferrada (León), Elche (Alicante), Guadalajara, Albacete, Cádiz and Madrid , in addition to a prison order.
Jordi Arias, in an image of the television program thanks to which he was discovered.
Until 2017, Lupine had accumulated at least 22 convictions, but all of them were for minor crimes, which did not require him to go to prison to serve them. That changed in 2020, when the Provincial Court of León took the first step for him to be imprisoned by ratifying a sentence from September of the previous year of a Ponferrada court that sentenced him to two years in prison for spending almost 7,000 euros with the credit card. credit of what was then her roommate. In October 2019, another ruling by the same judicial body had imposed an identical sentence on him for having paid with false 20 and 50 euro bills in shops in Ponferrada. These events date back to 2014, when Arias was 17 years old. At the hearing for this cause, he acknowledged that he spent a whole day trying to sneak these bills into various establishments with a friend,unsuccessfully. In that trial, he also said that he lived in a juvenile center. According to police sources, the cause that has led to the recent imprisonment of what is considered the biggest cyber-swindler in Spain was the ratification of the sentence for stealing 7,000 euros from his roommate.
Since last weekend he has been sleeping in the Madrid VI Penitentiary Center, in the town of Aranjuez. However, it is not the first time he has set foot in a prison. On at least two other occasions he had entered preventive detention after being arrested. The first was in 2017. The second, in 2019, after his arrest by the Central Operational Unit (UCO) of the Civil Guard, who had been on his trail for almost two years. He spent nearly a year and a half in preventive detention by order of the Valencia judge who was then instructing the case before it went to the National Court. Finally, he was released pending trial. That investigation was baptized by the armed institute as Operation Lupin, in reference to the fictional character of French literature Arsène Lupin,a white-collar thief specialized in disguising himself and assuming different identities to commit his robberies. Since then, for the security forces it is also the alias of Arias.
A complex network
That investigation uncovered that Lupine had allegedly developed a complex and sophisticated criminal network, which made it very difficult to relate him to the scams for which he earned up to 300,000 euros a month.
His system was based on creating
mirror
pages , identical to the official websites of stores selling electronic products, through which he sold devices that did not exist and that never reached their buyers.
He deceived thousands of citizens throughout the country, who bought video game consoles, mobile phones and air conditioners without knowing that a scammer was hiding behind that succulent offer.
To enter the money, he used dozens of
mules
, people who he paid just 100 euros to open an account in his name and thus not include him. The victims made transfers and then he was in charge of withdrawing the money and canceling the accounts. In his first criminal steps, he used his own name and his father's phone number to carry out the tricks. His closest team was made up of a computer scientist in charge of creating the
mirror
pages and a lieutenant who recruited the
mules
.
He even launched advertising campaigns on search engines and social networks to get the largest number of customers in the shortest possible time, because his fake websites lasted just a few days.
He could accumulate "tens of thousands of euros in just one day of collection activity", highlighted the Civil Guard when he was arrested in 2019.
Perfecting the method
His method was improving. In some of his scams, he got victims to download an app that supposedly tracked the shipment of purchased products, but actually redirected the SMS to their phone. Among them, there were the security codes of the banks when a transaction is made. Lupine allegedly used this method to fleece his victims' accounts and make transfers to his own. One of them was subtracted up to 20,000 euros. When it fell in 2019, it was preparing its masterstroke, it intended to win a million euros taking advantage of
black friday
, the day in which electronic stores launch great discounts in the pre-Christmas campaign.
According to investigations by the Civil Guard, the detainee had a violent character and in his day allegedly hired thugs to beat up subordinates who he considered were stealing from him. Agents found videos of some of these assaults on his cell phone when he was arrested almost three years ago. He also allegedly threatened a person who had denounced him by sending him a photo of his website and his family. In addition, he called several scammed posing as a civil guard, indicating a number to call to report him. That phone belonged to another of his victims and the barrage of calls crashed his line.
He was a man obsessed with his security, handling numerous identities, such as Arsène Lupin, and phone numbers.
However, all these precautions did not serve to prevent him from uncorking his last bottle in freedom last weekend.
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