crime
Over a million euros with fake shops: 40-year-old charged
The Bavarian Cybercrime Central Office is currently dealing with a case of fake shops on the Internet. photo
© Nicolas Armer/dpa
Customers ordered tools, school bags or toys from supposedly real shops – but the things never arrived. There is a man behind this who stole such a large sum of money.
A 40-year-old from Lower Franconia has been charged with fraud because he is said to have earned more than a million euros through fake shops on the Internet. The man is said to have processed more than 2,300 orders via 52 fake online shops between January 2020 and his arrest in May 2023, according to a spokesman for the Bavarian Cybercrime Central Office at the Attorney General’s Office in Bamberg announced.
The accused is said to have offered tools, school bags, toys and a whole range of other goods through shops with names such as “Elektro Ecke”, “housegarden.life” and “mydealz24.net”. When customers paid in advance for their orders, they lost their money and never received the goods they ordered.
According to the information, the damage caused by these fake offers amounts to around 325,000 euros. Investigators also found additional deposits totaling more than one million euros in the man’s accounts, which could not be assigned to any specific orders. Investigators believe the man received the funds through the same scam.
The 40-year-old was arrested in May 2023 and has been in custody since then. He is said to have initially committed the fraud from Berlin, then from a residence in the Bavarian district of Schwandorf, and most recently the defendant lived in the Rhön-Grabfeld district. In the course of the proceedings, the sum of around 1.4 million euros is to be confiscated from him. The Bamberg Regional Court must now decide whether to admit the charges.