The European Union's police agency, Europol, announced on Friday that it had arrested 118 people on charges of using stolen credit cards to buy airline tickets. The arrests were made at airports around the world on Wednesday and Thursday. The operation relied heavily on cooperation from Visa and MasterCard banking networks, along with 60 airlines, 80 airports and 45 law enforcement agencies worldwide.
Throughout the two-day operation, representatives from airlines and credit card companies were present at the coordination center run by Europol’s European Cybercrime Center (EC3). There, airline representatives identified the suspicious tickets. Then, “using their own booking system data, banking institution representatives confirmed the suspicious transactions in relation to the airline bookings,” the Europol report states.
Europol sent alerts to airport police with the suspects' details. In order to identify the suspects, as well as stolen travel documents, the European Police Office's analysts admit to accessing databases for information on crimes.
Europol also reports that many of those arrested were suspected of drug trafficking, as well as human trafficking, and some were repeat offenders. But on the blog Bank Info Security, information indicates that many of the arrested suspects were small-time drug traffickers of a larger organized crime ring.
