Gardaí carried out a raid in Dublin on Tuesday as part of an investigation into a criminal gang which has targeted businesses in at least 20 countries while claiming to sell Covid-19 personal protective equipment (PPE).
Officers in the north inner city searched a premises following a mutual assistance request from EU policing agency Europol.
At the same time, another 33 raids against the gang were carried out by police in Romania and the Netherlands.
Police in those countries arrested a total of 23 suspects. Gardaí made no arrests but seized €9,500 in cash along with phones and laptops. A garda spokesman said investigations are ongoing.
The gang have been operating what Europol called “a sophisticated fraud scheme” involving fake websites and emails. It has been under investigation in various jurisdictions since 2017 and is believed to have defrauded companies in at least 20 countries out of an estimated €1 million.
The organised crime group originally offered a variety of fictitious wholesale items for sale online, including wooden pellets. It creates fake email addresses and websites which bear a strong similarity to legitimate wholesale companies.
It then tricks buyers into placing orders and insists on payment in advance but no goods are ever delivered.
When the Covid-19 pandemic spread last year the gang switched focus to offering PPE such as facemasks, which were in extremely high demand.
It has mainly targeted companies in Europe and Asia. The gang is made up of nationals from various African countries who are resident in Europe. The defrauded money is laundered through Romanian bank accounts before being withdrawn at ATMs in different countries.
PPE fraud
The raids were carried out with the assistance of Eurojust, the EU agency for Criminal Justice Cooperation, and Europol’s European Cybercrime Centre (EC3). It is the second major operation targeting PPE fraud involving gardaí since the pandemic began.
Officers from the Garda National Economic Crime Bureau last year investigated a Roscommon businessman who served as the unwitting middleman for an international €15 million facemask scam.
He was interviewed in April 2020 as part of an investigation into attempts to defraud German health authorities, who were desperate to acquire facemasks during the pandemic. The German buyers transferred €1.5 million into the man’s account for the masks and gardaí believe the scammers planned to retrieve this money from him at a later date.
Following their investigation, detectives were satisfied that the man honestly believed he was taking part in a legitimate business deal and was himself being used by the criminals. No charges were brought.
Frauds involving PPE were common across Europe at the start of the pandemic as individual countries competed for scare equipment.
The EU’s anti-fraud office identified more than 1,000 suspicious businesses last year, including many selling fraudulent or dangerous Covid-19 related equipment, including PPE, hand sanitiser and testing kits.
In a report last November, Europol executive director Catherine de Bolle said criminals were using “uncertainty and change” to exploit new opportunities, and that was likely to continue.
