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Intensive actions were carried out from March 4 to 12.
Saulius Gagas, Head of the Vilnius County Main Police Station, and Arūnas Stankevičius, Chief Prosecutor of the Second Prosecution Division of the Vilnius Regional Prosecutor’s Office, will tell more about this operation at a press conference on Thursday.
The Germans became the target
“A major international police operation has been carried out. The operation took place in Sweden, the United Kingdom and Lithuania. A total of 5 people were arrested, all of them Lithuanian citizens. Approximately 1.5 million were acquired for crimes. Euros. The investigation began after receiving information from a bank whose employees identified large financial transactions. Three limited liability companies registered in Lithuania may have participated in the latter scheme. In a short time the criminal scheme was clarified. This fraud scheme is new and profitable.This is a mutated form of fraud.
The fraud scheme in place is new, smart, and extremely profitable. It has been established that the fraud scheme applied is a new mutated form of investment fraud: deposit fraud, whose main objective is to “numb” the surveillance of clients for half to three years, thus allowing not only traces of crimes but also the organizers to disappear. The victims are German citizens. Members of the academic community. We have 38 victims. There may be more of them, “Gag said during the conference.
The main suspect was born in 1951 and the youngest in 1978. One of the people has been convicted in Sweden for keeping fraudulent accounts. Another in Lithuania was convicted of driving a vehicle while intoxicated.
Prosecutor A. Stankevičius added that three suspects had been placed in preventive detention and two more had been in custody. A person is arrested in Sweden, we will ask to be transferred to Lithuania.
Some of the money is frozen
The study found that members of the academic community in Germany searched the Internet for platforms where they could help and keep their life savings safe. People were interested in keeping their funds on online deposit aid platforms abroad.
After discovering the offer that interested them, the people themselves initiated the deposit, filling out the requests and sending them by email. by post and received responses with offers and information on the individual accounts opened for them to which they had to transfer the amount of the selected deposit. The specified accounts, which allegedly belonged to depositors, actually belonged to the Lithuanian companies mentioned above.
The depositors entered into investment services agreements with a UK-based company run by a Swedish national suspected of having links to organized crime. Almost all the profits were transferred by the companies to companies in Greece, Hungary, Turkey, Ireland and Spain, and part of the profits were collected at ATMs in Sweden.
To prevent crime in progress, arrest suspects and crime organizers, Vilnius county. At the initiative of the officers of the specialized unit of the Chief Police Commissariat and the group of prosecutors formed in the Vilnius Regional Public Prosecutor’s Office, close cooperation was established with the police authorities of Germany, Sweden and the United Kingdom in coordination with Europol and officials of Eurojust.
Active actions of officials determined that in Lithuania more than 500 thousand. The € 1 billion deductions from individual accounts were frozen in a timely manner and scammers had no opportunity to use or transfer them to other accounts. More than 700 thousand. For an amount of 1 million euros, in close collaboration with the Financial Crimes Investigation Service under the Ministry of the Interior of the Republic of Lithuania, the amount was found in accounts in Greece, Hungary and Spain, the money was frozen and they returned the documents. for refund.
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