A man suspected of defrauding local telecommunications service providers through an international revenue-share racket that clocked up some €30,000 in losses, was cleared of all criminal liability.
Vasileios Spanos, a Greek man, was staying at a St Paul’s Bay hotel together with a friend back in April 2017, when police knocked at his door, acting on a tip-off about some “suspicious activity” taking place inside a particular guest room.
Upon entering the room, investigators came across two men seated at a desk with “a substantial number of mobile phones hooked up to a laptop” that was switched on, showing the website www.globalbilling.com.
All 28 mobile phones were making calls and in one of the browser tabs several numbers were noted, police officers subsequently testified.
A search of the room had yielded a box, containing hundreds of Vodafone SIM cards issued by Vodafone Greece, registered in the accused’s name.
Mobiles, SIM cards and laptop were all seized during the search and the two men were arrested.
Under interrogation, the accused admitted that the 30 mobiles, 17 chargers and 646 SIM cards were his.
Spanos also explained that he had made use of 66 SIM cards purchased at a cheaper price from a Bangladeshi street vendor in Athens.
The police pressed charges over the suspect fraudulent activity whereby a substantial amount of calls to UK numbers which were not listed with the country’s communications regulator were being generated through the use of Vodafone Greece SIM cards.
The owner of a revenue shared fraud number would generate income from every call received, with charges fluctuating much like the situation on the stock exchange, a GO plc representative explained in court.
Another local Vodafone representative testified that during a particular weekend an abnormal amount of minutes was registered when compared to the normal count generated by Vodafone Greece subscribers to UK numbers, with 43,000 minutes accumulated in comparison to the normal count of 2,000 minutes.
Investigators observed a spike in calls made from the same mobile phones to the ‘invalid range’ numbers that appeared to coincide with the accused’s visits to Malta between January and April 2017.
The accused had denied that he had activated the 61 SIM cards used to make 246 calls that had totaled 27 hours but gave no explanation for those calls, saying that he had accessed the Global Billing website only because he “worked with them.”
However, on the basis of all evidence, magistrate Donatella Frendo Dimech concluded that the prosecution failed to prove that the accused had made any gain from the suspect fraudulent calls.
Moreover, there was “nothing to suggest that the mobiles found were anything but normal mobile phones and communications made over Go and Vodafone Malta’s networks were lawfully made,” the court said as it ordered that the judgment be notified to the Police Commissioner for possible further investigations, to the Malta Communications Authority as well as to Europol and Eurojust.