« Arrows » recruited from Romania. Were washing money from crime

The police officers of the Buzau Organized Crime Fighting Service, together with the DIICOT prosecutors, carried out several searches, on Wednesday, in a file on committing the crimes to set up an organized criminal group and money laundering.

According to a statement sent by the County Police Inspectorate (IPJ) Buzău, 31 descriptions took place in Romania, in Buzău, Prahova, Dâmbovița, Călărași, Mehedinți, Vrancea, Mureș and Alba counties. At the same time with the action carried out in Romania, six home searches were carried out on the territory of Great Britain.

From the research it turned out that, between 2018 and 2024, 35 Romanian citizens would have been an organized crime group that had the purpose of obtaining important material benefits from washing the funds from computer frauds and deceptions.

‘Thus, the members of the organized criminal group, directly or through intermediaries (‘ arrows’, persons with a precarious material status, recruited from Romania), would have opened numerous bank accounts at financial entities and banking units in the United Kingdom, which they would have sold to persons residents in this country, with amounts between 150-1,300. The accounts would have been used later to wash the amounts of money from committing the aforementioned offenses’, the IPJ Buzau statement states.

In order to take possession of the money representing the price of the sale of accounts, the organized crime group would have made a ‘vehicle’ accounts, opened in the UK and Romania, by which the amounts were transferred, in order to hide the origin and final recipients.

According to investigators, the accounts would have been opened online from Romania, through applications installed on mobile phones with SIM cards allocated by operators in the UK or VPN applications and fictitious residence invoices for ‘arrows’ at certain addresses in the UK. After opening the accounts, the mobile phones with installed bank applications would have been sent from Romania to the United Kingdom.

Another method would have been in the transport of ‘arrows’ in the UK and their accommodation for a few weeks, during which time they were driven to various banks where they would have opened accounts.

‘From the evidence administered up to this moment it turned out that in the accounts that were sold by the members of the criminal group to residents in the United Kingdom, between June 2018 – March 2024, over 1,510,000 pounds, 312,000 euros and 56,000 Swiss francs, amounts that would come from 105 victims of information, Romania, Romania, Romania, Romania Switzerland, Poland, Italy, Germany, USA, Slovenia and Georgia) ‘, says IPJ Buzău.

The misleading of the victims would have been achieved by several methods. For example, the buyers of the bank accounts would have attributed their identity to the director of a company and, from an electronic address very similar to it, would have sent an email to the people in that company, asking them to make the payment of an invoice in accounts under their control.

By another method, the victims would have been contacted by people who recommended that they were part of the bank’s anti-fraud department, being notified that there is an attempt to fraud about the amounts of money deposited, the recommendation being to move the funds to another account, created in reality by the organized crime group.

« In order to document the criminal activity, under the aegis of Eurojust, the judicial authorities in Romania, the United Kingdom and France, with the participation of Europol, signed, in July 2024, an agreement for the establishment of a joint investigation team – JIT (JIT), » the statement said.