Three men in their twenties, who had created an online sales site for false dematerialized documents having produced nearly 3 million titles, were arrested last week and placed under judicial supervision, we learned Wednesday with investigators. Two of the three men were arrested in Normandy and the third in the Toulouse region. Placed under judicial supervision, they admitted the facts and will appear in court in Paris on September 10, added the number two of the Office for Combating Illicit Trafficking of Migrants (Oltim), Fabrice Saugner.
In September 2021, they created a French-speaking website where you could buy
“false dematerialized documents such as identity cards, Vitale cards, driving licenses, but also proof of address, invoices, files payroll, etc.”
, detailed Commissioner Saugner. Their site was detected in August 2022 by Oltim investigators during an online watch. Oltim has had a group of cyber investigators since the end of 2020, the search for identity document fraud being one of the priorities in the fight against smuggling networks. Investigators estimated that the site was visited by
“54,000 people per day”
and that it had generated
“2.7 million documents”
between its creation and its closure last week.
Oltim's number two noted that the designers and administrators of this site had rather
"the profile of hackers acting through games"
.
“They are brilliant. They are well versed in digital tools. They are not drug traffickers
,” he said.
“Their primary goal was not to make money. There was a desire to challenge authority. They were not targeting a particular audience. It was all-out, for fugitives, migrants, crooks
. Nevertheless, added the commissioner, they offered
“additional functionalities for a fee”
, of the order of
“thirty euros”
. Around 30,000 euros in cryptocurrencies were seized.