Officers of the Organized Crime Group of the Provincial Brigade of the Judicial Police of Santa Cruz de Tenerife have arrested seven people who are members of an organization dedicated to scams in the field of timeshare, through alleged sales of weeks of use in shifts in the South of Tenerife.
The police investigations, carried out in collaboration with the Economic Crime and Money Laundering Section of the National Police of Barcelona, began last April following a complaint filed by a notary from Barcelona, whose name was being used to give a greater appearance of legality to the writings that those responsible for the scams sent to their victims.
The notary reported that he had received several complaints from victims against the Notary's Office, all of them from foreigners and related to alleged operations to buy and sell rights over tourist properties, of which he had no knowledge.
As a result of the investigations, it has been possible to discover and dismantle this organized group of scammers, who were usurping the identity of this notary, falsifying printed documents with his name and notarial logo and others corresponding to tax settlement of the State Tax Administration Agency.
With this procedure, they managed to deceive their victims and get them to make bank transfers as fees for annotations in public records and documentary acts and settlement of property taxes.
The arrests were made in the Tenerife towns of San Isidro, El Médano, Granadilla de Abona and Los Cristianos. Six of those arrested were of Spanish nationality and one of German nationality and all had different functions assigned within the organization, according to sources from the National Police. All were placed at the disposal of the judicial authority.
Within the framework of the investigation, more than twenty victims have already been identified, from different EU countries, especially of French and Belgian nationality, more than twenty of them have already been identified, although it is suspected that the number of those affected by these scams may be much higher.
Likewise, so far, the minimum amount of the scams already exceeds the amount of 120,000 euros, figures that investigators believe will be much higher as progress is made in the investigations and new accounts used to commit the fraud are discovered.
In fact, the National Police calculates that during the next two years new victims of this criminal group will continue to appear, given that they will file complaints about the scams suffered with the authorities of their countries of origin.
These complaints will be sent, through the channel of international collaboration existing in judicial and police matters, to the Spanish Judicial Authorities for investigation.
ACN Press
