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Status: 05/03/2022 01:37 am
One of the largest online fraud processes in Germany begins in Saarbrücken. Investors are said to have lost more than 40 million euros via marked financial portals. The accused is said to be part of an international fraud network.
Investigators from Germany and Austria had been targeting the network for four years. In 35 raids in five different European countries, the authorities secured 5.1 terabytes of data. The documents for the process at the Saarbrücken district court now fill 866 files. The indictment is after SR-Information 728 pages long, so far 28 days of the process are scheduled until September.
The accused is 29-year-old Azem S. The public prosecutor’s office accuses him of commercial gang fraud. He is said to be part of a network that systematically robbed investors of their money with the help of online portals for highly speculative financial bets.
Tempting return promises
In confiscated databases, investigators found references to hundreds of such marked Internet portals. The trial will involve five of them. They are called “XMarkets.com”, “Zoomtrader”, “Option888”, “TradeInvest90” and “TradoVest”. Lured by promises of high returns, private investors deposited money there. They therefore assumed that they would bet on the development of stock market prices via the platforms, for example.
According to the public prosecutor’s office, telephone agents from south-eastern European call centers used tricks to persuade investors to transfer more and more money to the portals. In the end it was mostly gone. The paid-in money is said to have flowed into financial bets only in appearance, but in fact directly into the pockets of the suspected fraudsters.
With professionally designed websites, the victims were tricked into transferring money.
Apparently thousands of investors tricked
In this way, the gang is said to have caused enormous damage. The Saarbrücken public prosecutor’s office has now brought charges against a total of 1,153 victims from Germany and Austria. Together they lost around 42 million euros, an average of around 35,000 euros per person. According to the public prosecutor’s office, the highest loss for an individual is 5.5 million euros.
In fact, the damage caused by the gang is likely to be much greater. To SRThe investigators found the names of over 200,000 possible victims who paid a total of 115 million euros in evaluated databases.
Arrested while on summer vacation
In the summer of 2019, investigators raided a call center in Kosovo, from where telephone agents are said to have talked money out of investors. The accused S. is said to have managed the call center. The investigators caught him around two months after the raid on his summer vacation in Albania. He has been in custody in Germany since the summer of 2020. His defense attorney wanted to get on SR– Do not comment on the allegations. However, he announced that his client would appear in the course of the process.
The alleged head of the gang is said to have been a German who had made a name for himself in the past with online casinos and online poker platforms. Police special forces arrested him in Austria in January 2019. He was later extradited to Germany. He died in custody in Saarbrücken in the summer of 2020 from a drug overdose. The exact background of his death remains unclear.
Due to the investigations of the Saarbrücken public prosecutor’s office, five online portals are offline. According to consumer advocates and investigators, the scam with other fictitious trading portals is still going on.