Rotterdam police arrest AI scammers over €400k thefts

Police in Rotterdam have rounded up a gang who ran a sophisticated phishing scam using a fake banking app that stole nearly €400,000 from 170 victims.

The gang set up a bogus bank helpdesk service that targeted customers by phone and asked them to download an app that could read the NFC chip on their bank card.

Police arrested the two men behind the operation, a 23-year-old man from Vaassen, and a 25-year-old man from Ede, on October 4. On Tuesday they appeared in court, where a magistrate extended their detention for 90 days.

The fraudsters made the scam more plausible by using AI-generated voices to read out messages telling their victims to check if Google Pay had been installed on their phones by their bank.

When they saw it had not, they were told to press 1, which connected them straight to the fake helpdesk.

The victims were told to install the app and hold their card to their phone, allowing the criminals to download their details. At the same time accomplices would try to hack into the account using the card’s PIN.

Ruben van Well, head of the Rotterdam cybercrime team, said the victims ranged in age from their twenties to their eighties. “We found a lot of young people had been defrauded,” he said. “The victims also came from all over the country.”

Police confiscated hundreds of thousands of euros in cryptocurrency following the arrests and took the fake app and server offline. “We are not ruling out further arrests,” said Van Well.