After a year-long investigation, police in Europe say they’ve arrested 106 individuals in connection to a big cybercrime ring with shut ties to the Italian mafia.

The group, which cops say operated out of a headquarters in Spain’s Canary Islands, is alleged to have defrauded a whole bunch of victims by finishing up quite a lot of on-line schemes—together with phishing operations, business email compromise assaults, and SIM swapping. Criminal operations allegedly encompassed a variety of actions, together with “online fraud, money laundering, drug trafficking and property crime.”

Police stated they’d lately raided 16 homes in Spain and Italy as a part of the investigation, seizing “many electronic devices.” Items generally utilized in on-line fraud, akin to SIM playing cards, 224 bank cards, and point-of-sale terminals, have been all confiscated.

The full extent to which the mafia was concerned with the group isn’t made fully clear in press releases, although Spanish police said that the criminals largely operated from a headquarters in “the south of #Tenerife [the largest of Spain’s Canary Islands] and laundered money for Italian mafia clans,” including “Casamonica, Camorra napolitana, Nuvoletta and Sacra Corona Unita.”

“This large criminal network was very well organised in a pyramid structure, which included different specialised areas and roles,” said Europol, which offered technical assist for the investigation. “Among the members of the criminal group were computer experts, who created the phishing domains and carried out the cyber fraud; recruiters and organisers of the money muling; and money laundering experts, including experts in cryptocurrencies.”

Police declare most of the schemes concerned tricking victims into sending the hackers giant sums of cash—a reasonably good description of what a BEC assault seems like. After filching the funds, the criminals would then assist to launder the cash by “a wide network of money mules and shell companies,” Europol said. Authorities added that such operations generated as a lot as 10 million euros final yr.

The extent to which the mafia is concerned in cybercrime has lengthy been a subject of hypothesis and debate. Common knowledge has held that mafia teams are increasingly engrossed in on-line schemes, although the diploma to which they’ve penetrated such markets continues to be not notably properly understood.

Italy’s Anti-Mafia Directorate (DIA) lately published a report through which it alleged that organized crime teams have been more and more turning to the darkish net, in addition to to cryptocurrencies like bitcoin and monero, to obscure their illicit dealings. The report additional claimed that, very like different industries, covid-19 has pushed the mafia more and more on-line—as social distancing insurance policies proceed to hamper their real-world enterprise actions and provide chains.