The CyberWeek with Cibercapitan - Ep. 5

The Simpsons got it right again. In this fifth episode of The CyberWeek, recorded on 24 January 2025, the Captain brings a phone scam that looks straight out of that episode with Homer’s auto-dialler. A gang set up a system that fired off a thousand text messages a minute and chained calls together until it found a victim. The result: almost two million euros stolen from 760 people. Do the maths and you’ll see some of them were left with a considerable hole.

The Civil Guard operation seized one of those auto-diallers, the same old idea taken to an industrial scale. Because that’s the lesson I repeat again and again. Fraud hasn’t changed its nature, it has changed its speed. What a scammer used to do by hand, a machine now does a thousand times a minute. I also take the chance to tell you about my visit to the first Cyberdefence Conference at the University of Almeria, my home turf, with talks from the Civil Guard, the Police and people who know a great deal about malware. No one is a prophet in their own land, they say. One tries.