The ICC’s Commercial Crime Bureau carried out investigations and reported that fraudsters had published fake European banking guarantees on at least 29 different web sites to lure potential clients to invest in projects and finance schemes.
The web addresses gave the impression that the scam sites were run by either Euroclear Bank, the international clearing system for the settlement of transactions in securities and Eurobonds, or Bloomberg, the information services provider.
"We were informed that advance fees of hundreds of thousands of dollars were paid for the issue of these fraudulent guarantees, and the web sites were used to validate the documents," explained Jon Merrett, Assistant Director of ICC's Commercial Crime Bureau and Cybercrime Unit. "The amounts represented on the fraudulent sites ranged from 50 million to over 400 million dollars."
In addition to being used to procure advance fees, reported Merrett, these guarantees were to be used in bogus High Yield Investment Programs (HYIP) which promised high returns from low risk financial instrument trading.
The bank guarantees were confirmed to be fraudulent, and Euroclear Bank and Bloomberg were alerted to the intellectual property breaches. CCU co-ordinated the approach to the fraudster's ISP who complied with their request to shut down the offending sites. Four of the fraudsters, based in San Francisco and Lugano, Switzerland, have been arrested.
"By shutting down the fraudulent sites in cases like this, we are not only protecting investors from scams, but also helping companies such as Bloomberg to maintain their reputation," said Merrett. "The big risk is that these frauds could rock the trust that the banking, finance and insurance industries are built on."