The Civil Guard has dismantled, with the arrest of two people, a group dedicated to committing allegedlyand scams in the Canary Islands with the buying and selling vehicles from Spain and Thailand and with a total of 120,000 euros illegally obtained and more than 30 injured.
A note from the Civil Guard indicates that this operation has been carried out by agents of the Organic Unit of the Judicial Police of the Command of the Civil Guard of Santa Cruz de Tenerife and has culminated in an international arrest and extradition order from Thailand to Spain of two Spanish citizens allegedly involved in a series of scams.
The researchers, specialists in combating cybercrime over the Internet in the province of Santa Cruz de Tenerife, learned of a series of complaints related to scams in a classified ads web portal.
Apparently the scammers were posing as employees of used vehicle buying and selling companies, located in different parts of the Canary Islands and the peninsula.
According to the note, these people carried out a course of action consisting of the selection of victims located in other islands to avoid direct contact and made use of real images obtained from legitimate dealers to support their fraudulent advertisements.
They asked the victims for a percentage of the sale price of the vehicle as a reserve and later disappeared without delivering the agreed vehicles.
The Civil Guard discovered that the fraudsters, who were initially located in Spanish territory, were operating from Thailand, where they had established an apparently legal fraudulent structure.
One of the alleged perpetrators was arrested in May 2023 at the Reina Sofía airport in Tenerife South when he tried to enter Spanish territory, while the second was arrested in early June 2023 at the Bangkok airport in Thailand.
He is currently in a prison in Thailand, waiting to be extradited to Spain in the near future.
The Civil Guard continues to work to identify and help potential victims of scams, as well as to recover the stolen funds.
The detainees are attributed the alleged crimes of belonging to a criminal group, continued fraud, simple fraud and usurpation of Civil Status.
The Civil Guard highlights that the success of this operation is international cooperation in the fight against transnational crime.