A complaint filed in San Vicente del Raspeig has enabled the Guardia Civil to uncover a scam involving fake rental advertisements that has affected victims in various parts of Spain and caused financial losses exceeding 20,000 euro. The Guardia Civil has arrested two people in Alcantarilla (Murcia) and Almería in connection with the scams.
The Guardia Civil’s Investigation Unit in San Vicente del Raspeig began its investigation in mid-February of this year after a person reported transferring 900 euro to reserve a property that, in reality, did not exist. After making the payment, the supposed landlord blocked all contact with the victim. During negotiations, the victim had sent photographs of an ID card, a bank statement, and a property registry extract, documents that turned out to be forgeries.
From this initial case, agents from the Guardia Civil’s Investigation Unit in San Vicente del Raspeig detected similarities with other complaints filed in cities such as Bilbao, Barcelona, Madrid, and Valencia. The analysis has so far linked 16 completed scams and several attempted scams, within what has been dubbed “Operation Falkiler.”
Those responsible posted advertisements on real estate platforms for entire apartments located in towns with particularly tight housing markets. The properties were offered at significantly lower prices than usual, a strategy aimed at quickly attracting people with limited resources or who had difficulty finding housing.
According to the investigation, the suspects used different phone numbers registered to third parties, with allegedly fictitious identities. After committing several scams, they abandoned these lines to make it harder to locate them. They also used nearly twenty bank accounts at different institutions. These accounts were opened and closed in short periods and, in some cases, ended up being blocked by the banks themselves after they detected suspicious activity.
One of the main obstacles for investigators was tracing the defrauded amounts. The money transferred by the victims initially arrived in accounts controlled by one of the suspects and was immediately distributed among other accounts linked to the second person involved.
The use of multiple addresses, telephones registered to third parties, and bank accounts, combined with the geographical dispersion of the complaints, complicated the identification and location of the perpetrators.
The cooperation of financial institutions ultimately allowed investigators to determine the location from which the crime had been committed. A 25-year-old woman was arrested in Alcantarilla, in the Region of Murcia, while the second suspect, a 39-year-old man, was located and arrested in Almería.
Both are under investigation for the ongoing crimes of fraud and falsification of public documents and have been placed at the disposal of the Civil and Instruction Section of the Court of First Instance of San Vicente del Raspeig, which is competent to take charge of the case.
The Guardia Civil believes that the two detainees operated in a travelling manner in different provinces and used telematic means that allowed them to operate from anywhere.
In the face of these types of scams, the Guardia Civil recommends being wary of rental offers with prices far below market value and not making any payments or transfers before visiting the property and verifying the identity of the supposed owner.
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