Nina Chausow
POLICE have arrested 212 people for a €4 million Malaga-based fraud affecting over 7,000 victims.
Posing as an accredited publicity firm, the telemarketers that worked there would coerce customers into giving them tax and bank information, to which they later made false charges.
The employees would create web pages upon which they would place advertisements with information pulled from the Yellow Pages, and then charge the customer between €200 to €398.
When customers refused to pay, the employees would become insistent and threatening, calling at all hours of the day and night.
The investigation was prompted by a report from a Granada community of nuns, who were contacted by the fake press agency with a bill for an unsolicited publicity project, and has since been denounced by 374 ex-customers.
The police discovered twenty different businesses around Malaga and Torremolinos linked to the primary office in the city of Malaga.
