The National Police has dismantled an extended criminal organization for more than a dozen locations that were dedicated to foreign citizens in an irregular situation, in exchange for significant amounts of money. On average, criminals made them pay about 15,000 euros and the investigators estimate that the organization would have so far obtained a benefit of about three million euros. Within his mode of operationalso steal the ID of three Spanish women already. The police operation, which has received the name of Operation Carmín, has resulted in 26 detainees in the provinces of Barcelona, Girona, Jaén and Alicante, including the five leaders of the organization, accused of the crimes of documentary falsehood, favor of illegal immigration and belonging to the criminal organization.
The investigation, which has had three different phases, began at the end of May last year in Cornellà de Llobregat (Barcelona) following the complaint filed by a woman who when she went to do a process of registration told her that they could not do it because she was registered in another municipality, and also told her that she was married. Thus he discovered that he had not only stolen the ID, but also his identity had usurped. From there the investigation that gave the first arrests in Camprodón (Ripollès) and Cornellà de Llobregat began and ended up extending to Barcelona, L’Hospitalet de Llobregat, Vilanova del Camí, Girona, Vilafant, Figueres, Sant Feliu de Guíxols, the Jonquera, Úbeda and Alicante.
The investigation, carried out jointly by the Brigades of Foreigners and Borders of Barcelona, Girona and Cornellà de Llobregat, has been able to prove that the criminal network dedicated to the favor of illegal immigration orchestrated a system of fraudulent couples, all registered in the registry of de facto pairs of Catalonia. In that first phase, 157 couples were analyzed and of the information achieved, 70 possible fictitious couples found out. In total, 227 couples were analyzed, of which 212 turned out to be fraudulent. In addition, the transnational nature of the criminal network, which had the necessary infrastructure to favor the fraudulent regularization of Moroccans and Algerians residents out of Spain, mainly France and Belgium, mainly.
The researchers detected coincidences in the regularization of these fraudulent couples, since most used the same notaries and managing – one of them in Salt (Gironès) – used to submit the applications before the different subdelegations of government and where they intervened material of interest linked to the fraudulent regularization of foreigners. All of them are currently investigated. The criminal network assumed different tasks, among them, to capture foreign clients who would like to quickly regularize their situation and put them in contact with Spanish citizens – men and women – in addition to facilitating all the necessary advice and documentary process, even accompanying them to the different municipalities to carry out the registration, prior approval and payment to the owner of the domicile used. The agents came to detect that in one of the floors used by the organization for registration, up to eight couples passed in a short space of time.
The investigation, in which it has been proven that they used false documents and/or documents stolen from Spanish women, using their filiation data without their consent, remains open in its third phase, analyzing all the information obtained following the dump of the information achieved, both of the computer or telephone effects and of the documentation intervened in the management.
