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AUTOMÓVILES CRESPO THE BIGGEST AND BEST FOR PRICE CHOICE AND QUALITY Tourist holiday rental scam busted
Guardia Civil officers have dismantled a criminal organisation specialising in a holiday rental scam and targeting tourists across the country. in a statement, the police said that the ‘rent Scam’ organisation was made up of 42 people and allegedly led by a man who ran it all from his prison cell.
they said that the gang specialised in ‘computer scams related to vacation accommodation’, and that 128 scams had already been identified. they have not ruled out further scams coming to light.
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twenty-nine people have so far been arrested and another 13 are under investigation. the arrests were carried out simultaneously in the local provinces of alicante, Valencia andCastellón, as well as Madrid, toledo, Ciudad real, pontevedra, a Coruña, ibiza, Bilbao, Santander, huelva, Cádiz, Málaga, Granada, Murcia, Barcelona and tarragona.
the operation began in September, when the Guardia Civil detected an increase in complaints related to vacation scams on various specialised platforms and websites. the officers were then able to verify the existence of a complex criminal organisation that was divided into subgroups throughout Spain, locating and relating them to more than a hundred criminal acts. the police said the ‘network acted in different groups that were led by a man with a long criminal record for computer scams, and who directed them from a prison where he was an inmate’. to commit the scams, the police said that someone
With the information provided by the victims, a comprehensive study of the website pages where the accommodation was offered was carried out, verifying how those responsible placed adverts on legal platforms in which they offered accommodation at a lower price than the market average, in order to capture the attention of the victims and then collect the money in advance.