The young man detained in a phone fraud case told Latvian television how the scheme worked, in which residents of Latvia were called on behalf of the police and bank employees, writes LSM+.
According to LTV, he was one of the participants in a call center operating in Ukraine. His task was to be the first to contact a potential victim: to introduce himself as a law enforcement officer and inform them about an alleged attempt at fraud.
The young man is currently under arrest and awaiting a court decision. In an interview with LTV, he called himself a scammer, but did not show his face. His name has been changed.
According to the detainee, he responded to a job advertisement on Telegram. He was promised a high income — from 3000 to 5000 euros per week. He claims that the money was needed for the treatment of his sick father, but this story raises questions: it later turned out that he was arrested after returning from a months-long trip to Russia.
In the criminal scheme, he was the so-called "first" — the person who initiated the conversation with the victim. A database containing names, personal codes, and addresses of residents was used for the calls. This information helped create the impression that the call was indeed coming from an official institution.
Initially, the victim was informed that some individual had allegedly attempted to withdraw money or obtain a loan by proxy. The main goal of the first stage was to find out how much money was in the person's bank account. If the amount was of interest to the scammers, the victim was passed on to the next participant in the scheme.
In the second stage, the perpetrator introduced himself as a bank employee. The person was told that someone had attempted to access their online banking from an unknown device, after which they were offered to continue the conversation on WhatsApp. The victim was then convinced that their account had allegedly been compromised, that it needed to be closed, and that the money should be transferred to a "new safe account."
If the person had any doubts, the scammers used additional explanations. For example, they claimed that according to bank rules, it was not allowed to use two accounts simultaneously. In some cases, they also attempted to arrange a loan in the victim's name.
According to the detainee, his reward as the first participant was 7.5% of the stolen amount. The second participant received 10%, and the remaining part of the money went to the organizers of the scheme. Most often, he said, people aged 60-70 fell victim to such calls. At the same time, the detainee claims that the scammers did not specifically target only elderly people but called from the existing database.
The State Police emphasize: real police officers do not ask to switch to WhatsApp, do not send photographs of service IDs, do not send images of people for identification, and do not contact residents via video calls in messengers.
