According to reports highlighted by the CICPC, the criminals entered the profiles of PDVSA retirees on the Patria network and extracted their digital assets. Later they proceeded to exchange the stolen funds for bolivars.
The Corps of Scientific, Criminal and Criminal Investigations of Venezuela, better known as CICPC, highlighted this week that it caught the members of a criminal organization carrying out illegal activities regarding digital assets in Maturín. This gang dedicated efforts to target retirees to steal their digital assets through the Patria network.
CICPC Get their Hands Over This Cryptocurrency Thieves
This information got revealed by the national director of the CICPC, Douglas Rico, who highlighted the news through his official Instagram account. There he expressed that they caught three members of the criminal group known as Los Crackers de Oriente.
These criminals used to rob retirees of the state-owned entity Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA) by disrupting and entering their accounts on the network, extracting the funds from the victim.
The investigations started right after one of the victims confirmed to the authorities that the crypto funds kept in his profile on the Patria network had suddenly vanished.
The victim came to know what had happened and issued a legal complaint to the authorities, so the case got studied by a commission from the CICPC Computer Crimes Division.
The investigation led by the authorities highlighted that the criminals acquired the private keys of the victims, disrupted their accounts on the Patria network, and proceeded to extract the digital assets.
The director of the CICPC expressed that the thieves exchanged said currencies for the local coin, for which they opened bank accounts falsifying the documents and proceeded to migrate the funds to their accounts.
Venezuela and Cryptocurrency Scams
As digital assets acquire more fame in a country such as Venezuela, scams, and cybercrimes intending to extract funds from victims are on the rise, encouraging official authorities to keep raising red flags and warnings about the modus operandi used by these fraudsters.
At the end of April, the CICPC highlighted various messages that were going viral through WhatsApp, in which data and links got spread to defraud citizens through phishing-type campaigns.
In these cases, scammers send emails and messages out of private fear to potential victims, playing the role of false customer service of some service they use (these criminals tend to focus on Crypto Exchanges, administrative entities, or even banks.)
These criminals later indicated that the victims’ profiles got disrupted and executed specific campaigns with the sole intention of extracting access or personal data to break the accounts and empty the funds kept in those profiles.
Regarding the Patria network, the CICPC and SUNACRIP have previously warned about the proliferation of scams to extract funds from potential victims.
These warnings especially point at those criminals that go through the role of managers who offer to do the whole process. These false managers convince the victims to give them personal data so they can find a breach in the victims’ accounts.
By: Jenson Nuñez
