Spanish Police arrested 55 members from the Black Panthers SIM swap gang

The Spanish National Police have arrested 55 members from the ‘Black Panthers’ threat group, including the leader based out of Barcelona. The actors were operating four multiple activities including social engineering, vishing, phishing and carding.

As per the Spanish National Police report “The criminal group consisted of a network structure, made up of interconnected and perfectly defined action cells, whose division of tasks dealt with knowledge, accessibility to stolen information, and experience”.

The attackers’ goal was to execute SIM swapping attacks, which is to port a target’s phone number to the attacker’s device. With this action, the hackers will gain access to the victims’ SMS and can use the same for bypassing 2FA protection on their bank accounts and manipulate the same.

Black Panthers and their cyber manipulation

The SIM swapping is done by a combination of phishing, vishing and call forwarding to impersonate the identities of individuals by conversing to mobile service provider support agents.

In certain cases, the hackers even impersonated themselves as technicians for a local office by stealing the credentials of their employees. After gaining access to the bank accounts of their targets, the amount will be transferred to several money mules in the Levantine coast.

As per the Spanish Police, ‘Black Panthers’ managed to manipulate 100 victims before their arrest, making 250,000 euros. The gang was also lively on the dark web and transacted using cryptocurrency. The hackers have used this monetary power to purchase several luxury products and resell them for even more profits.

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