Two hundred and fifty million euros for Tim, another 70 for five telephone companies: this is the amount of the seizure authorized by the investigating judge, who in Milan accepted the request of prosecutors Francesco Cajani and Eugenio Fusco. The Financial Police have already notified the seizure decree for a total amount of 322 million euros. The provision was issued as part of the second line of investigation into an alleged huge scam carried out by some companies operating in the telecommunications sector. In 2018, a similar investigation involved WindTre, which, like Tim, was not under investigation. At the time, a fraud of around 99 million euros had been detected and, in addition to the first-degree trial for attempted contractual extortion, for which the preliminary hearing had to take place again, seven plea agreements were reached. concluded, a restitution of 18.5 million euros and significant seizures for more than 23 million. This second line of investigation concerns Tim's Vas, premium paid services that can be activated on your SIM. The company is not under investigation, but 20 people are under investigation, including some who were employees of the phone company at the time, but not at the top. The prosecution also targeted companies with offices in Milan, Rome, Turin and Madrid, which allegedly created and worked for the sale of additional paid services not requested by customers.
How does incorrect activation work?
According to the prosecution, from 2017 to 2019, paid services, such as games, ringtones and horoscopes, were activated on the SIM cards of unsuspecting users, at a negligible daily cost and therefore more difficult to intercept. In the case of WindTre, prosecutors established that there were around 30-40,000 activations per day at a cost of 5 euros per week. In Tim's case, the prosecution claims that the activations became operational automatically. It was enough to “visit a web page or consult an application with your mobile phone, sometimes with the deception of fraudulent advertising banners and, without doing anything (what we call the 'O-Click'), to find yourself instantly subscribed to services that require payment of a weekly or monthly fee,” explained prosecutor Marcello Viola.
A witness who was a security engineer for Tim at the time was heard in the courtroom: “We realized that active numbers with premium services on M2M devices – machine to machinenot to cell phone SIM cards but to other devices, like home automation devices – there were over 100,000 of them. I can't answer why.” A mechanism in place since at least 2017 and up in September 2019. Between September and October 2018, the prosecution reconstructed that a temporary block had been placed on undue activations for four weeks: the subsequent resumption, asserts the prosecution, is proof of this. “a precise commercial choice, also because, as soon as Tim wanted it, there was a blocking of fraudulent activations, but also a cancellation of activations, which obviously did not even suit the telephone operator.” According to the office of the prosecutor, Tim demonstrated that he took the activation to heart by filing two complaints only after Agcom began its inspection activity.
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