It is a case which led the investigators of the regional service of the judicial police (SRPJ) of Rouen in the Paris region, in Poland and as far as Israel.
A very sophisticated fraud file which resulted in the identification of a link in the criminal organization in France and his arrest.
On December 2, a 25-year-old Frenchman was sentenced to three years in prison and a fine of 30,000 euros for playing the role of little hand to international crooks who had embezzled nearly 600,000 euros from an established company in Le Havre (Seine-Maritime).
This man, already known to the courts, was arrested on November 4 at his home in Sarcelles (Val-d'Oise).
The Criminal Court of Le Havre retained facts of fraud and money laundering.
The case began in the spring of 2019. A transport company in Le Havre, specializing in the chartering of containers, storage and handling, was targeted by crooks with fertile imaginations.
They pretend to be the manager of the company by using an email address with his exact first and last name and contact the accounting department.
They then ask him, using a vocabulary adapted to the business world, to urgently establish bank transfers from the company's accounts as part of a client file to be treated with complete discretion.
The crooks trust the accountant and, to give credibility to this operation, which they describe as "secret", involve a second person in the exchanges: a fake lawyer whose e-mail address also includes the name of a recognized firm. .
They present invoices resembling official documents to justify these transfers.
President scams
The accounting department makes three transfers: two for 145,000 euros on June 21, and one for 287,000 euros on June 25.
The Le Havre company ends up discovering the deception and files a complaint with the public prosecutor's office in Le Havre, which opens an investigation entrusted to the SRPJ in Rouen.
Investigators then discover that the IP address of the senders of the mails sends back to Israel.
And that, above all, the latter have set up an extensive system of concealment.
While tracing the bank transfers, the police find that the money ended up in an account of a shell company in Poland before disappearing.
It is this kind of artifice that allows crooks to keep their distance from justice and to taunt the authorities in these cases of false transfer, nicknamed "scams to the president".
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However, a rare occurrence, investigators identify an intermediary, a 25-year-old Frenchman, who plays the role of "mule" for crooks abroad.
The latter went to Poland to sign the documents allowing the opening of the fictitious company.
He was finally placed in police custody, hearings during which he only indicated that he had been "stamped" for this mission before being brought to justice and imprisoned.
"The contractors used a thousand sheets of screens to confuse the tracks and put themselves at a distance from this intermediary, underlines the divisional commissioner Jérémie Dumont, deputy director of the SRPJ of Rouen.
It is an international fraud case of a very high level of technicality and organization.
But our investigations, with the collaboration of Europol and the Polish authorities, made it possible to identify this suspect.
This is rare in the business of false money transfer scams, which are often difficult to elucidate.
The sponsors of the scam to this day remain unidentified and still run into the wild with their loot.
