Santa Cruz de Tenerife (EFE) global amount of 818,331 euros.
The president of the Cabildo, Pedro Martín, has detailed in the plenary session of the island corporation, at the request of the Popular group, that in all cases the modality of the fraud carried out against these four companies was phishing, through which its author or authors They posed as trusted providers of those.
Specifically, they pretended to be personnel from Endesa Energía, Unión de Lavanderías de Canarias, Scania and Mecno Service, an Italian company that supplies Metropolitano de Tenerife.
In the case of Titsa, the amount defrauded amounted to 194,634 euros, in Metropolitano, 97,526 euros, in Balten, 226,100 euros, and in the IASS, 300,071 euros.
Pedro Martín has emphasized that this type of fraud is “increasingly sophisticated” and is not limited to simply sending an email, but in some cases its authors made phone calls and sent emails from company accounts whose identity they impersonated.
All this to gain the trust of the personnel of the economic area of the companies and, at a given moment, request that the income be made in a different bank account, explained the president of the Cabildo.
It has also detailed that in all cases information files were opened except in the case of Metropolitano, whose former manager took a year to inform the board of directors that the company had been the object of fraud, and “after a few weeks” he abandoned The charge.
Martín has indicated that these cyber-scams were reported either to the Police – the Metropolitano provider did so to the Carabinieri – or directly to the courts.
And he has invited to reflect on the possibility that, from compliance with the provisions of the transparency law, it is a question of safeguarding the sensitive information of the providers, since it can be accessed by cybercriminals to act against public administrations, For this reason they are more vulnerable.
The political groups of the Cabildo de Tenerife have asked to redouble efforts to prevent this type of cyberattack, which, according to what the vice president of the island corporation, Enrique Arriaga, from Ciudadanos, and the PSOE spokesman, Javier Rodríguez, have reported, are around 100,000 a week.
The non-attached councilor María José Belda and that of the PP Zaida González have coincided in criticizing that they did not act with greater diligence since the first cyberattack was learned, taking into account that two years have passed since the first, in Metropolitan (March 2020 ) and the remaining three, between July and November 2022.
Belda and her former partner in the Sí Podemos Canarias group David Carballo have also emphasized the different treatment given depending on the case, because while the former manager of Metropolitano was not opened a file, in Balten “almost automatically” it was opened to an intermediate position, on which “the focus was placed”, and in Titsa it was extended “to all people related to the economic area”. EFE
