In a statement released, the Portuguese Judicial Police (PJ) said that the three men and one woman detained in the Lisbon area are aged between 30 and 60, including a former bank employee, suspected of “qualified fraud, document forgery, computer fraud and money laundering, among others, to carry out fraudulent banking transactions”.
The victim is an Angolan citizen residing in Angola and among the suspects detained, in addition to the former bank employee, are a couple and a man who allegedly played the role of “front man” in the bank fraud involving identity theft and document forgery, the PJ told Lusa in additional clarifications.
The investigation, led by the Lisbon and Tagus Valley Directorate, began in March 2024, following a complaint from a Portuguese banking entity.
According to the bank's statement to the PJ, “a client of its, resident in Angola, did not recognise banking transactions that had been ordered in person in his name at a branch in Lisbon, and as a result of which he had been defrauded of around 130 thousand euros, claiming that he had not been the one to carry them out, because he was not in Portugal”.
The PJ also explained to Lusa that part of the total amount lost in the scam against an Angolan citizen was detected in the account of a woman accused in this investigation.
“The criminal conduct in question involved the prior collection of the client's banking information, the recruitment of the usurper of the identity of the injured citizen, the forgery of the false identification document that the usurper used and also the execution of several and successive subsequent banking transactions, designed to divide and conceal the benefits of the crime, and to distribute them among everyone”, the PJ said in a statement.
House and non-house searches were carried out and documents, computer and telecommunications equipment, five vehicles and “in conjunction with the competent judicial authorities, bank balances” were seized.
The fraud is similar to another reported by the PJ at the beginning of the month, which led to the arrest of nine people, including one in Belgium, as part of ‘Operation Flanders’ but, when questioned by Lusa, the PJ denied any connection between the cases.
The investigation is ongoing and the inquiry is being supervised by the Public Prosecutor's Office of Cascavel.
The detainees will be brought before the courts for enforcement measures to be applied.
