The Policía Nacional have arrested 69 people in connection with a computer bot that acquired all ID appointments to later sell them, despite said appointments being free.
Basically, if you want to get an appointment at your local Policía Nacional station in order get your ID updated, etc, you can book an appointment online. However, this gang use a computer bot to automatically acquire all the available appointments only to sell the appointments on to those desperate enough to need them.
The arrests took place in Madrid, Albacete, Alicante, Almería, Badajoz, Barcelona, Vizcaya, Burgos, Cádiz, Córdoba, Baleares, Marbella, Murcia, Tarragona, Tenerife, Toledo and Valencia. A further 25 people are under investigation in Madrid and Cádiz.
Foreigners who needed an appointment in many cases had to find alternatives ways of getting an appointment so they contacted this ‘service,’ paying between 30 and 200 euros.
The police investigation began in Valencia through the Brigada Provincial de Extranjería y Fronteras thanks to a report from the Unidad Central de Ciberdelincuencia. Thanks to this report police provincial departments across Spain were able to proceed with individual cases
The bot in question would bombard the police online service with appointment requests, thus obtaining the vast majority of available appointments. The bot was capable of getting past security measures (Captcha) on the Policía Nacional website.
This made it practically impossible for foreign people to get their paperwork through.
The gang leaders gave instructions to their intermediates on how to use a VPN to hide their IP addresses. Each hit on the website therefore used a different IP address to stop the server blocking them.
Just with the arrests of the top four in the gang the police were able to confiscate a great deal of computer hardware and software, illegally obtained official documents and 206,950 euros in cash. They were also able to identify intermediate companies that used the bot’s service, thanks to the gang’s own records.
(News: Spain)