He threatened to poison mineral waters and food products in supermarkets, with injections of cyanide and rat poison, if he did not obtain the payment of a ransom, required in cryptocurrencies.
For this reason, a 47-year-old resident in the province of Trieste was arrested by the Postal Police at the request of the Rome Public Prosecutor's Office.
There were about 200 extortion attempts, including against companies in Germany, France, Spain, Austria and Switzerland.
This is what emerges from the investigation by the Rome Public Prosecutor's Office.
"And the immediate international information exchange conducted by the Rome Public Prosecutor's Office and Cnaipic, through the cooperation of the judicial police officers at Europol - explains a note - made it possible to create an investigative collaboration between the Italian cyber-agents and the colleagues of the Austrian police engaged in a similar and well-established investigative activity on the same character, through the development of the IT and financial traces left on the scene ".
This collaboration proved to be decisive to allow the police to reconstruct the various pieces of the extortionate mosaic and "converge on the identification of the Trieste citizen as the main suspect in all illegal conduct".
The prosecutors ordered a home search against the suspect who was under probationary custody to social services, an alternative measure to detention granted him precisely following a previous sentence, definitively, for other crimes of computer fraud and extortion.
During the activity, a series of objects were found including a tablecloth, an oven, a scale for the weight of food, completely identical to those that appeared in one of the amateur videos shot by the suspect, in which the method of poisoning. to be carried out by inserting thallium sulphate into cans of product.
The evidence collected by the Postal Police allowed the Judge of Surveillance of Trieste to revoke the previously granted reward measure, alternative to prison, and subsequently to the Rome investigating judge to order the measure of detention in prison due to the danger of reiteration of the crime.