Officers from the National Police, in a joint operation with the Catalan Mossos d’Esquadra, and with the collaboration of the General Directorate of Traffic, have dismantled a criminal organisation allegedly dedicated to the fraudulent issuance of driving licences, and which operated from Catalonia at various points in the rest of Spain. The operation has resulted in 616 detainees, among which are the 14 members of its leadership. Those arrested are related to the crimes of falsification of documents, bribery, money laundering, belonging to a criminal organisation and against traffic safety.
The investigations began in the summer of 2020, when a person was detected in a control who exhibited an authentic driving licence despite the fact that he presented a discordant fact, since the holder had sanctions in his file on a date prior to the issuance of the licence in the Girona Provincial Headquarters of the DGT. Subsequent procedures and checks proved that it was a fraudulent permit, despite its apparent authenticity.
The investigation that arose from this initial event revealed the existence of a criminal organisation dedicated to the fraudulent issuance of driving licences to nationals and citizens of other countries.
Based on the verification that this criminal practice was taking place by personnel who worked for the DGT, the police worked together with this body to dismantle this fraudulent activity.
Given that at a certain point in the investigation it was detected that both the National Police and the Mossos were investigating people who belonged to the organisation, a joint investigation team was set up.
The structure and operations of the organisation
The brain of the group was a computer scientist who worked as a subcontractor at the Girona Provincial Traffic Headquarters since September 2019. This worker, taking advantage of his job, usurped the access codes of DGT officials to be able to carry out this criminal practice, initially, with family and friends. At the time that teleworking began to be established in mid-March 2020 as a result of the pandemic, and already with a superior knowledge of how all the computer applications of the DGT worked, and from the tranquillity of his home, he saw the opportunity to get an economic profit from his knowledge.
To issue the permits, he needed someone who could provide him with beneficiaries of these cards, so he contacted a man who provided him with the network of intermediaries that he needed. This is a person who already had a criminal record and who acted as the visible head of the organisation: he captured customers, collected the permits and gave him protection. This man exercised the role of co-leader of the organisation.
The mechanism of action was as follows: the co-leader wove a network of intermediaries who acted as clients’ achievers. These are people who, in some cases, ran telephone booths to which people who did not have a driving licence went with the intention of obtaining them.
Then, they provided the necessary information regarding the permit they wanted to obtain and their personal data, and the achievers provided it to the co-leader of the organisation, who in turn sent it to the computer scientist who created the permit on the DGT system, which then issued the authentic physical card, since it was unknown that it was fraudulent from the beginning. To do so, some of the required steps were skipped, such as the satisfaction of fees and taxes and other administrative procedures. Although the main scope of the organisation was in Catalonia, there were beneficiaries from anywhere in the rest of Spain. This criminal network is responsible for the issuance of 1,800 authentic Spanish driving licences fraudulently.
The two leaders of the group shared the enormous benefits obtained, at a fixed price per card depending on the category of demand. This is the price they charged the achievers who, in turn, charged the beneficiaries the amount they wanted in each case for their own profit. Amounts that could range from 3,000 to 15,000 euro were paid to obtain each permit.
With the money obtained from this criminal practice, the main investigators bought real estate, vehicles and other luxury products, and maintained a very high pace of life that could not be justified with the DGT’s salary in the case of the computer scientist or with the absence of income from the co-leader. A part of the money was masked with the acquisition of cryptocurrency.
Exploitation of research
Once the researchers were clear about the hierarchical and operational structure of the organisation, the people who were part and what roles they exercised, a police device with 16 entries and investigations was carried out in the towns of Sant Feliu de Guíxols, Quart, Vic, Calonge and Llagostera and two registers in the headquarters of the provincial traffic headquarters of Girona and Guipúzcoa, and the fourteen members of the organisation’s leadership were arrested. On the same day and in the days following the operation, 616 people related to the network were arrested in 29 Spanish provinces, mainly the beneficiaries who had paid to obtain the fraudulent permits, and the final number of detainees is expected to be close to a thousand.
The agents found more than half a million euro in cash at the home of relatives of the computer scientist’s partner, who was also part of the organisation. Various documentation related to documentary forgery was intervened and five cars were seized, two of which were high-end. The profits obtained by the investigated organization are very large, exceeding seven million euro.
The fourteen members of the organisation’s leadership went to court on Thursday and the judge ordered the entry into prison of eight of them.
Of the total number of detainees, the National Police carried out the detention of 105 people outside Catalonia, specifically in A Coruña (1), Álava (2), Alicante (17), Almería (1), Asturias (1), Balearic Islands (13), Burgos (1), Cádiz (2), Granada (6), Guipúzcoa (2), Huelva (1), Jaén (1), La Rioja (2), Las Palmas (5), Lugo (1) , Madrid (9), Malaga (4), Melilla (1), Murcia (12), Santa Cruz de Tenerife (4), Toledo (3), Valencia (9), Valladolid (4), Vizcaya (1) and Zaragoza (2).