Mariano Gaik Aldrovandi
03/21/2021 3:12 PM
Clarín.com
Police
Updated 03/21/2021 3:12 PM
"Caballero, as I was saying, he would be making a collage with his face, his penis and the conversation with the minor,"
says the voice on the other end of the phone.
Audio is the fragment of a sextortion.
Previously, the victim had entered an application to find a partner.
There he met a young woman, they
matched
, they advanced in the conversation and exchanged photos.
What he didn't know was that the woman on the other side wasn't real.
Behind him was someone who pretended to be someone else and sent him photos downloaded from the Internet.
He did send his private photos
.
Within a few days, the world collapsed.
A call from an alleged police officer told him that he knew that he was exchanging photos with a minor and that if he did not pay a certain amount of money, they were going to scribe it on social networks.
"He would be making viral on social networks Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and the media what he does in his free time, of harassing minors,"
says the alleged agent.
In the background, the typical sound of a monitoring center is heard with modulations of police radios.
"Communicate or you are going to have to wear a mask and give explanations to all your followers and relatives, sir,"
threatens the offender who, judging by his way of speaking, shows that he is reading a generic message and has difficulty pronouncing certain words in English or ending in "s".
Victims enter dating apps and exchange photos with scammers.
/ ShutterImage
As this newspaper has been publishing, the modality of sextortion is already installed in our country.
In recent days, Justice advanced with two investigations into gangs that are dedicated to scamming people who are looking for a partner through social networks for sexual encounters and are then extorted by false authorities that force them to transfer money by telling them that the young woman they contacted is a minor victim of a human trafficking network.
On Friday, the police raided and identified a 42-year-old woman from Martínez, San Isidro district and a 37-year-old man and another 44-year-old woman from Belén de Escobar, although
none of the three were detained
.
The procedures were carried out by the Departmental Subdelegation of Investigations (sub DDI) of Pilar, as part of a case headed by the district attorney Raúl Casal, according to sources in the case informed
Télam
.
The victim of this new case of sextortion came to make
transfers of almost 550,000 pesos
through the Mercado Pago platform.
"The victim got into debt by taking out credits, with his cards and even had to borrow money from several friends and acquaintances, until he decided to file a complaint," said one of the investigators.
In this case, the man appeared last January at the Prosecutor's Office No. 1 of Pilar and there he said that he had contacted via Instagram with
a young woman who called herself “Sofía” and with whom he exchanged sexual photographs
.
One of the victims paid 550 thousand pesos through Mercado Pago, extorted by false policemen.
Later, he began receiving calls and WhatsApp messages from people claiming to be members of the Argentine Association for the Fight Against Cybercrime (AALCC).
Diego Migliorisi, vice president of the AALCC, confirmed to
Clarín
that there were complaints from people who received WhatsApp messages with the association's logo.
That situation was warned before the Justice.
These people told him that “Sofía” was a minor, that she was held captive in the hands of a human trafficking gang, that they knew that he was involved with the criminal organization and that if he wanted to avoid a search and arrest, he should transfer a Amount of money.
With data on account holders, money movements and IP addresses provided by the Information Security Division of Mercado Libre - Mercado Pago's mother company -, and other intelligence tasks, judicial and police investigators identified the two addresses that were raided on Friday .
At Martínez's home, the 42-year-old woman said she had no electronic devices, but Sub DDI Pilar agents found
phones and computers hidden under the washing machine, her children's beds, and in the bathrooms.
There, four cell phones were seized, four tablets -two of them new in a closed box-, a notebook, a desktop PC and a Honda XR 250 Tornado motorcycle, which it is suspected could have been bought with the extortion money.
In the other raid, in Escobar, two cell phones were seized from the other two suspects.
Another case
Another prosecutor from Pilar, Andrés Quintana, from UFI 2, carried out three raids in Boulogne (San Isidro), Ingeniero Budge (Lomas de Zamora) and Hurlingham, where five suspects - two men and three women - were identified, within the framework of a cause where a sextortion was performed with the same modus operandi.
In this case, the victim is a 23-year-old young man who contacted
a girl who called herself "Camila"
on the
ar.skokka.com
meeting site at Christmas
.
After exchanging photos and some dialogues, criminals began to extort him via WhatsApp who told him that they were Federal Police detectives, that the girl with whom he had spoken was a minor who was missing and had been captured by a network of trafficking.
The false police officers also told him that to avoid notifying the judge and escaping from an arrest, he had to send him money through a Mercado Pago link, and in total there were five transfers for an amount of 110,000 pesos.
The consulted spokesmen indicated to Télam that the prosecutors Casal and Quintana exchange information to determine if it is the same organization or only coincide in the modus operandi.
An installed mode
Migliorisi, a lawyer specializing in cybercrime and founder of the AALCC, told
Clarín
that the association made a complaint in the City of Buenos Aires, but that "
there are victims throughout the country who, out of fear or shame, do not dare to do so
."
And he added: “Many victims out of fear and the shock effect pay.
Others enter our page and see the large poster that warns about this and they don't even make a complaint ”.
In that sense, he explained that in the different cases that were known in recent days "the modus operandi is the same" but they do not know "exactly if it is the same band or there are several that copied the modality."
Example of "sextorsive" mail.
To add credibility to this
tale of the virtual uncle
, the scammers set the call with the background sound of a monitoring center that can be easily accessed via YouTube.
“This gives it some credibility and has a psychological effect on the victim.
Our psychology team analyzed it, ”Migliorisi said.
“Permanent user training is essential because organized crime is already fully on the web.
In this case, apparently, we can say that they did not use much sophistication.
In 2019, sextortion from Ivory Coast was a boom.
Today it is here and improved ”, he added.
In the event of a threat of this type, the authorities recommend
not deleting any message and making a report immediately
.
EMJ
Look also
They asked him for intimate photos on a social network and then extorted him: he paid $ 75,000
Sextortion: he made a date on a sexual encounter website and fell into a trap that cost him $ 110 thousand