Nine employees of Movilnet, a mobile operator owned by the Venezuelan state, have been arrested and accused with bypass fraud, per reports by VTV News (in Spanish). Venezuela’s Prosecutor General, Tarek William Saab (pictured) stated that the employees were running a ‘parallel’ telecoms service with special webpages, account top-ups, provisioning of new lines and reuse of blocked IMEIs.
The arrested employees, who mostly belong to middle management, are said to have used servers in Miami to avoid international termination fees by rerouting traffic to the numbers of Movilnet customers. It was also claimed that the alleged crimes could not have been committed without the knowledge of senior managers in Movilnet.
The arrested employees are:
- Ángelo Navarro, General Manager of Optimization and Performance
- Ronny Monrroy, Operational Support Manager
- Roger Figueroa, Service, Support and Production Manager
- Kelvin González, Operational Process Manager
- Néstor Moreno, Support Coordinator of Prepaid Platform
- José Luis Nieves, Director of Operational Support and Systems
- Samarys Galicia, Executive of the PDVSA account on Movilnet
- Ronald Ochoa, Customer Service Executive
- José Carrillo, Customer Service Executive
Tarek William Saab appeared on television to speak about the alleged crimes. The tweet below includes a clip (in Spanish).
#EnVideo📹| Tarek William Saab, Fiscal General: Presentamos un caso de especial relevancia, se trata del desmantelamiento de una red que operaba una Movilnet paralela, esto implica una importante pérdida económica para una empresa estratégica del país#VenezuelaSolidariaYDePaz pic.twitter.com/1G7iWHZd0y
— VTV CANAL 8 (@VTVcanal8) December 20, 2019
