German authorities nix 1,400 websites used for cybertrading fraud

BERLIN (Reuters) -German investigators and banking watchdog BaFin have shut down over 1,400 illegal domains in Eastern Europe that were involved in cybertrading fraud, officials said in a joint statement on Monday.

Dubbed Operation Heracles, the probe was conducted by Baden Wuerttemberg state criminal police and BaFin, Europol and Bulgarian authorities in an effort to crack down on those facilitating the use of fraudulent trading accounts.

Users of the websites were directed to brokers operating from call centres abroad who would encourage them to invest large sums. For many it took months to notice that their money was not being invested, the authorities said.

"The perpetrators are becoming increasingly professional," said Birgit Rodolphe of BaFin. "They use artificial intelligence to churn out illegal websites and use them to lure investors into traps."

This operation follows a previous shutdown of 800 illegal domains in June of this year. There have since been 20 million attempts to access them.

"The measures significantly weakened the criminal actors by specifically disabling their technical infrastructure," the authorities said.

(Reporting by Alexander Huebner and Natascha Koch, Editing by Friederike Heine)

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