Lupin – Spain´s Cyber King Fraudster Arrested In Madrid
Jordi Arias Fernández, aka, “Lupin”, considered Spain’s most wanted cyber scammer, has been arrested in Madrid.
Jordi Arias Fernández, who called himself “Lupin” after Arsenio Lupin, the French thief from the novels of Maurice Leblanc, currently a hit Netflix series, was apprehended after being spotted by a member of the public in the Shoko in centre of Madrid in the early hours of Saturday 8th January.
He is wanted by numerous judicial authorities and arrest warrants have been issued by courts as far apart as Ponferrada, Elche, Guadalajara, Albacete, Cádiz and Madrid.
In 2019 he was convicted of fraud and sentenced to two years in prison.
On arrest he was found to have a false ID and officers found 12,000 Euros in cash on his person.
He kept a relatively low profile, living in hotels under assumed names and stayed away from luxuries, despite earning vast sums through his online scams, offering discounted technological products as bait to lure victims but which never arrived and only served for him to access their data.
He often sought out vulnerable young people as accomplices, paying them commissions and fees for providing fronts for his activities including opening bank accounts which were then used to scam victims.
When he was arrested, the police also seized 80 lottery tickets: he had convinced one ticket seller to open a bank account for him if he bought all the tickets from his kiosk.
As in previous visits to the capital, the hotel where he was staying in Madrid had been reserved for a whole month, paid in advance.
He committed fraud using websites which appeared to be legitimate,but were in fact cloned fake sites.
There an estimated 2,400 victims who are believed to have been defrauded of around 900,000 Euros.
After getting the victims to give him their phone number during the online payment process, he then asked them to download an application that would supposedly allow them to track their order.
What the victim actually did was enable all SMS messages received to be redirected to him who was then able to obtain the text codes sent by banks to confirm authorisation and purchases.
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