People from at least 15 countries including Poland, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Latvia, Netherlands, Spain, UK, US, Canada and India were potentially affected by the scam, involving the fictitious sale of electronic items via online auctions hosted on eBay and other online Polish platforms.
After making electronic payments for goods such as Apple Mac computers, customers were instead sent items such as bricks, fruit and vegetables. In the case of eBay customers, nothing at all was sent. Once electronic funds were received by the fraudsters, they were transferred to unregistered prepaid cards and cash was withdrawn via ATMs. Customers shopping on eBay are protected by a Money Back Guarantee but the fraud exposure would otherwise have amounted to tens of thousands of EUR since 2013.
Two key suspects were arrested while attempting to withdraw fraudulently obtained cash from an ATM. Subsequent house searches led to the seizure of items including anonymous prepaid cards, cars, laptops, mobile phones.
EC3 cyber experts assisted Polish law enforcement authorities by providing expertise and access to Europols databases. eBay also supported the case from their Dublin operations centre by assisting police to trace criminal online activity via live monitoring systems.
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