Indictment: 21-year-old allegedly caused 550,000 euros in damage with phishing
A 21-year-old Berliner is alleged to have used phishing to rip off goods and money worth more than half a million euros.
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The Bavarian Cybercrime Central Office has brought charges against a 21-year-old from Berlin. Investigators accuse him of defrauding victims of their money on a large scale using phishing.
The Bamberg Public Prosecutor General's Office has announced that the man, who was arrested in March 2024 and has been in prison since then, is accused of 149 cases of “commercial computer fraud” in the indictment before the Bamberg Regional Court. Due to the age of the accused at the time of the offences, the charges will be brought before the juvenile chamber. It still has to decide whether to admit the indictment.
Accused had been active since 2022
From January 2022, the Berlin man is alleged to have obtained online banking access data from savings banks and other banks throughout Germany on a large scale. According to prosecutors, he then attempted to lure victims to a phishing page via text message (or with only partially identified accomplices) and get them to forward a registration link to initialize the push TAN procedure. Victims were also persuaded to pass on this information in telephone calls with victims.
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In most cases, the accused is said to have set up virtual debit cards on his smartphones to gain full access to the online account. He used them to withdraw money from NFC-enabled ATMs and make purchases in supermarkets and petrol stations, the investigators accuse him. By the time he was arrested on March 7, 2024, money and goods worth around half a million euros had been collected in just over two years.
But that was not all, according to the public prosecutor's office, the accused has even more on his plate: a further 45 cases in which he also tried to access accounts failed. He is said to have spied out further access data to 122 accounts via his phishing panel and kept them in stock for later use.
Under adult criminal law, the defendant could face a prison sentence of between six months and ten years for commercial computer fraud. The Bamberg public prosecutor's office did not specify what would be expected in the event of a conviction under juvenile criminal law.
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(dmk)
