European Police Arrest 100 Suspects in BEC Crackdown

European police have released details of two major operations against business email compromise (BEC) fraudsters, which resulted in the arrest of close to 100 suspects.

Operation Wine Cellar and Operation Theatre were carried out in November 2021 but are only now being made public due to operational reasons, Europol said.

They were carried out by the Anti-Economic Crime Department of the Budapest Metropolitan Police with the support of Europol’s European Financial and Economic Crime Centre.

The Budapest Metropolitan Police made the arrests after working its way through two complex fraud cases.

They involved an organized crime group in the region which targeted state-owned companies with fake invoices.

“The criminals would impersonate a service company to inform their victims that the service company now had a new bank account to which the payments for the provided services should be sent,” Europol explained.

“Once the payments were made to the bank accounts controlled by the criminals, the funds would be moved around to conceal their illegal origin.”

The scheme defrauded 94 organizations in this way, racking up profits of €2.8m for the scammers.

The gang is said to have used a “sophisticated money laundering infrastructure” to obfuscate the flow of proceeds from these crimes and hamper investigator efforts to track it down.

Europol money laundering specialists and financial analysts were sent to Hungary on both action days to help investigators with house searches and forensic analysis of seized devices, the policing group said.

BEC has for several years been the highest-earning cybercrime type for threat actors. In 2021, it resulted in losses of $2.4bn for victims, over a third of the total reported to the FBI that year.

Around a year ago police in Europe arrested nearly two dozen suspects in a €1m BEC bust.