26 phishing arrests in Italy

Police swoop on

Poste Italiane

spam scam gangs.

In a first for Italy, the

Guardia Di Finanza

has made 26 arrests from two separate groups of phishing fraudsters, in the culmination of an operation, dubbed ‘Phish and Chip’, aimed at tracking down phishers defrauding banking clients of the national postal service

Poste Italiane

.

The 26 included 18 Italians and eight foreign nationals, mostly from Eastern Europe but resident in Italy. The gangs are accused of sending out emails claiming to represent the

Poste Italiane

, and directing victims to faked websites to gather banking details, which were then used to strip accounts of funds. They are thought to have used casinos to enable larger withdrawals than offered by ATM cash machines. No details of the scale of the phishing activity have yet emerged.

A judge involved in the case has called for improvements to the laws governing such fraud, including a specific crime of phishing, describing current legislation covering some of the crimes involved as ‘weak’.

An announcement from the

Guardia Di Finanza

(in Italian) is on their website

here

, and a full press release is carried by an Italian anti-phishing website

here

. A translation of the release is on the

CastleCops

site

here

, and more comment from

Sophos

is

here

.

Posted on 16 July 2007 by

Virus Bulletin