Group suspected of creating more than 500 fake car auction websites is the target of an operation | Federal District

This Thursday morning (25), the Civil Police of the Federal District (PCDF) served 12 arrest warrants to dismantle a criminal organization suspected of carrying out scams through the cloning of car auction websites. According to PCDF, the group had been operating for at least five yearswith 540 fake websites.

Prisons and others 10 Search and seizure warrants are carried out in the capital São Paulo, in Santo André and in São Bernardo do Campo, with support from the São Paulo Civil Police. In total, there are around 61 indictments of people involved in the scheme, which worked like this:

1. Criminals selected real websites of famous companies in the vehicle auction industry. Then they cloned these sites, creating identical ones, just changing the email address extension. “com.br” for “.net”;
2. Then, criminals paid digital marketing companies to boost the fake addresses on search engines like Google. Thus, when a person searched for the real company, the cloned website appeared in the first results of the search list. and not the true one;
3. People misled would enter the fake website and start talking to the criminals, thinking they were dealing with the real company, until they deposited their bids;
4. Even false auction notes were sent to victims who only realized the scam months later, when the car was not delivered. The victims were also no longer able to contactas the criminals had blocked the phone.

“The crime office was a rented room in a commercial building in Santo André that was searched today. The criminals clocked in from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. in that room, working all day, scamming victims all over Brazil as if they were actually a company” , informed the PCDF.

According to the police, 540 Malicious websites were kept in stock by the group. After using the same fake name in many scams, the fake company began to get a bad reputation on complaint websites. Then, it was taken down and a new name was added, from another company. On many websites, even the coat of arms of the DF Court of Justice was used to give credibility.

In the 9th DP alone, in Brasília, 10 incidents were recorded with combined losses of R$470 thousand. However, according to PCDF, it is estimated that there are hundreds of other victims spread across Brazil.

According to the PCDF, everyone involved was indicted for the crimes of participation in a criminal organization, money laundering and dozens of electronic frauds. Combined, the sentences amount to more than 30 years in prison.

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