This Thursday morning (11/12), the Federal Police (PF) launched Operation Mimicry, which is investigating a sophisticated bank fraud system involving the falsification of the biometric data of elderly people, some over 100 years old.
The group used young people posing as account holders, registered false fingerprints and facial recognition at Caixa Econômica Federal branches, and then carried out successive withdrawals and large transactions.
According to the PF, the potential loss exceeds 1 million reais in customer accounts in Bahia alone.
The investigation began after an alert from the Center for National Security and Fraud Prevention (Cefra), which identified an abnormal pattern: extremely durable elderly people, with low financial transactions, began to register sudden activities and operations inconsistent with their profile.
The analysis revealed that the criminal group operated undercover within Caixa’s own units.
Some of the people investigated are newly hired employees, who allegedly used privileged access to fraudulently record the biometrics of “customers”, in effect accomplices recruited to pose as the account holders.
After that, the scam moved to the second stage: the criminals made withdrawals from lotteries and transferred the money to accounts linked to the scheme.
To date, around twenty fraudulent accounts have been identified in the cities of Guanambi, Salvador, Serrinha, Eunápolis, Feira de Santana, Castro Alves, Cachoeira, Euclides da Cunha, Conceição do Coité and Itamarajú.
The PF executes two orders of suspension of the exercise of public functions against Caixa employees, in addition to three search and seizure warrants in Belém (PA) and Dom Eliseu (PA). There was also a judicial blocking of the group’s accounts, to prevent the money from continuing to be dispersed.
The name of the operation, Mimicry, refers to the camouflage mechanism used by animals in nature, a metaphor for how fraudsters imitated victims’ identities to hide the crime.
The persons involved may be held responsible for theft by fraud, criminal conspiracy, insertion of false data into an information system and other offenses provided for by criminal legislation.
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