back to article Europol knocks out mobile cybercrime gang in Spain

Europol and la policía española have taken down a gang of alleged cybercriminals engaged in a fraudulent phone calls scam, said to have caused financial damaged estimated at €2m, as part of an operation codenamed "Walker". Coordinated police action in Barcelona on 6 July resulted in the arrest of nine suspects and the …

  1. Dan 55 Silver badge
    Devil

    Too difficult to program alarms guv

    Perhaps they should disable premium calls/SMS while roaming. It's not exactly a typical use case.

  2. Alister

    That's Lester's secondary income buggered then...

    as above

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Premium Calls

    At least one operator I use allows you to configure whether I want to allow or restrict premium calls and SMS, and other types of services--I imagine others are the same? Working on the uninformed presumption that those services are not often used by the majority of the population, I would recommend taking five minutes of your time to disable them as a precaution.

    The other precaution when travelling to a high-risk area such as Barcelona¹ is to get a prepaid card (in-country or from home, depending on your use case), that way the loss is capped to however much you put in the card plus the phone itself plus whatever else they have taken. Expect to be separated from your credit cards, passport, boarding passes if you already have them, and whatever other stuff you happen to be carrying in your wallet or purse.

    ¹ In terms of petty crime (and corruption). The upside is that there is no violent criminality to speak of.

    1. Alan Brown Silver badge

      Re: Premium Calls

      "At least one operator I use allows you to configure whether I want to allow or restrict premium calls and SMS"

      Those restrictions frequently don't work when roaming.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Premium Calls

        > Those restrictions frequently don't work when roaming.

        Can you please quote any terms and conditions that state so?

  4. herman

    and what would prevent a crim from turning those money wasting features on again?

    Also, I thought that there are no more roaming charges in Europe...

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