Operation Chargeback: German court lifts nine arrest warrants in major credit-card case
The Koblenz court wants further investigation before assessing the suspicions. Some suspects in the alleged fake-subscription case had spent more than eleven months in custody.
Koblenz Regional Court has lifted nine arrest warrants in the Operation Chargeback investigation. News agency dpa reported the decision on 29 October, citing a court statement. The court says further investigation is needed to establish strong suspicion of fraud or computer fraud. As that work is expected to take considerable time, the warrants cannot remain in force.
The court had already declined to admit the indictment filed in June to trial in its submitted form. It wants greater clarity about the origin of the credit-card data and how payments were initiated. Some of those involved had spent more than eleven months in pretrial detention, according to dpa.
A central legal distinction concerns who activated the payment. A deceived cardholder entering data and starting a payment may constitute fraud. Someone else using the data to activate a payment may constitute computer fraud. The court considers that sequence insufficiently investigated.
In August, prosecutors described an alleged network involving fake websites offering dating and pornography, among other content. Their explanation of the indictment against nine people, published in August, concerns more than three million cardholders in 193 countries, over eighteen million subscriptions and alleged losses exceeding €260 million between 2016 and 2021. Suspects allegedly also arranged access to German payment processors and concealed money flows.
