Trusted pawns served as hooks. In Ukraine, they frequented shelters and other places where the displaced population from areas invaded by Russia gather. Between women who have lost their homes due to the Russian advance in Donetsk, Lugansk or Zaporiyawho have nothing more than their poverty, threw the bait: they would pay for their trip to an EU country, they would activate an international protection file as refugees, they would alleviate their precariousness… That EU country has turned out to be Spain, and the supposed benefactors, a network of gambling players online.
Capturing Ukrainian women and subduing them had a little-known, almost dystopian, marginal benefit for the members of the criminal organization: what was valuable this time was not their bodies, but their identities, the useful asset to commit scams on betting platforms and hide the loot. It is the latest and most sophisticated performance of human trafficking, and it is also the key crime committed by a gang dismantled by the security forces of Spain and Ukraine.
Agents of the National Police have dismantled a Ukrainian criminal structure based in Alicante and Valencia. The crimes attributed to them are, in addition to trafficking and fraud, those of document falsification, usurpation of marital status, computer fraud and money laundering. It is a doubly combined operation: sand crimes of cyber-scam and fraud are mixed with those of human traffickingand it has become necessary to join the efforts of the National Police with that of the Ukrainian police.
Throughout these years of war, the band has created numerous accounts with the usurped identities of more than 5,000 people of 17 nationalities. Among them, at least 55 women – the operation is open and many more may appear – who cThey were suitable in the areas most affected by the war from Ukraine, they brought them to Spain, they took their documentation, they used it and… the help ran out: they returned to their hard life as refugees in their own country.
group of friends
What the Police have named Operation Sunflowers – in reference to the emblematic flower of Ukraine – has been open since April 2025, and its exploitation has been brought forward as soon as investigators discovered the plans of the leader of the network, who was preparing to leave Spain. His destination was to be Thailand, where I had bought a home with cryptocurrencyfruit of their illicit profits.
The boss called himself “the teacher.” He is a Ukrainian computer expert, well versed in the use of bot networks and in seeking support from other criminal organizations. As his business progressed, He had his most striking tattoo, a Ukrainian flag, removed which he had painted on his left arm.
All of the detainees, 12, are Ukrainian nationals, and They are all computer experts. They had settled in Alicante and Valencia. a group of friends, couples, men and women who knew each other in Ukraine, who went to soccer games together in that country and who four years ago settled in Spain. The Police do not rule out that the majority have evaded their obligations to defend their country.
The teacher gave the orders about how much money to put on which platforms, when and by whom, and with which bots the organization had at its disposal, which each detainee had at their home. But the gear worked like a clock, “everyone already knew what they had to do,” explains the inspector. Mónica Alba, head of the group for integrity in sports and betting of the Central Specialized and Violent Crime Unit.
In the band it was not necessary to try too hard: the bots bet massively on them. They only had to deal with collecting the profits. Even the teacher’s mother-in-law He had a bot in his home running on a PC. “He often got stuck and called other members of the organization to fix it,” says Alba.
“The programs they used They imitated human behaviorbut in a faster and more precise way,” says the inspector. A newly created gambling account of the gang could obtain in three months earnings of 60,000 euros.
The trafficking
The members of the band already had 15 years of experience in the world of scams and gambling. online. The National Police has found them a loot of 4.7 million euros, and places them at the top of, so far, 240 complaints for identity theft.
And that is another key to the case, which alarmed the National Police. A growing group of citizens have found themselves before the Tax Agency, which demands gambling profits from them… It’s just that they haven’t played anything. These are people whose identities were robbed by this gang, and with their IDs and other data they opened accounts on gaming platforms.
They placed the profits on them, theoretically, while they used the identities of the Ukrainian women for the work of banking mules. They brought them to Spain, they put them up in hotels, they paid for their food… When leaving the suitcase, they always obsessively accompanied by one of their pastors, they were taken to a CREADE care center, to which tens of thousands of Ukrainian refugees have come since 2022 to normalize their situation.
At CREADE in Malaga they started to get upset of the arrival of protection requests in batches, and the notice came from the Western Andalusia Police Headquarters which, together with Madrid and Valencia, has intervened in Operation Sunflowers.
“This is how they created a financial network that they had under their control, without the possibility for women to denounce what they did not understand”, explains Inspector Ana, without a publishable last name, head of the anti-trafficking group that has participated in the operation.
“They were grouped into ‘travel groups’. They were accompanied at all times. These women did not understand the purpose of their trip to Spain. They were told that it was to process their temporary protection and improve their living conditions, but as soon as they registered they were returned to Ukraine. Their vulnerability conditions have been verified,” he explained this Thursday. Andrii Polisiuk, colonel of the Ukrainian Judicial Police.
The gang opened 115 bank accounts in the name of 55 potential victims. When they already had a NIE issued in Spain, they returned them to Ukraine. No coercion, no beatings, just deception. They could not spend more than seven days in this country. And once their data was burned, used to the end, they still made a profit by selling it online to other criminals.
Prey on the weak
“Trafficking is a form of modern slavery, invisible chains that destroy the lives of thousands of people. Today we can say that one of the links in that chain has been broken,” celebrated the Ukrainian police officer. Vladimir Larenchov in the same appearance of police commanders, held in Madrid.
”When a war breaks out, the vulnerability of the victims increases in the area of trafficking, and that is taken advantage of by criminal groups,” explains Fernando Guerrerochief commissioner of the anti-trafficking unit of the National Police.
That is why in Spain the Penal Code “gives greater reproach to the conduct of the authors in these cases,” adds Guerrero. The crime is more serious if the victim is more vulnerable.
For the Ukrainian criminals of this gang there was no war. They were far from the front, on the Spanish coast, driving luxury cars, alternating operations with more than 80 mobile phones, meeting for dinner and going out together, planning what to put the money they were earning into. The aggression that has already claimed so many lives on the Ukrainian front was not their concern. In fact, in closed corners of the internet, invitation-only platforms, hired the services of other experts in programming and bots. They are Russian.
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