Online scams proliferating at alarming rate
Online and telephone scams have become a scourge, with estimates suggesting they cause hundreds of millions of euros in losses every year.
The perpetrators, Greek and international players, are constantly inventing new ways to defraud their targets, manipulating unsuspecting citizens and extracting valuable information such as bank codes.
The long list of victims was recently joined by the mayor of Minoa Pediadas on Crete, Manolis Fragakis. A single phone call from an alleged supplier was enough for perpetrators to remove 7,800 euros from his account.
The Hellenic Banking Association (HBA) recently estimated that bank account hackers manage to snatch around 500,000 euros per day, or €175 million per year, even though many of these incidents are prevented through technological fraud prediction systems.
The losses, though, are thought to be substantially larger. This is due to the fact that victims frequently fail to report incidents to the police and sometimes spend significant amounts of money hiring specialists, such as independent investigators, with questionable results, to track down offenders.
What’s more, there are types of fraud that are not strictly considered to be online banking fraud, including bogus investing firms that use the promise of huge profits to gradually drain their victims of their money with their consent. This type of crime involving bogus investing firms has led to losses of more than 200 million euros over the last two years.
The absence of territorial restrictions and the use of sophisticated techniques for concealing digital traces make it difficult to detect computer fraud under Article 386A of the Criminal Code.
Thus, if the money goes missing, it is almost impossible to trace the perpetrators.
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