The National Police has arrested a 50-year-old man as the alleged perpetrator of a million-dollar scam perpetrated in the Alicante-Elche airport car park for not paying all the corresponding fees for vehicle parking. The fraud is believed to have started in 2018 and the amount may exceed one million euro.
The suspect allegedly circumvented the security measures of the parking lot so as not to pay the fees for parking the vehicle inside the enclosure. In the operation, the police have located more than 20 licence plates used by the arrested person to carry out the scam and more than 170 vehicles involved in this plot.
The arrested person, who is charged with a crime of fraud and document falsification, has been made available to the Elche Guard’s Court of Instruction, as reported by the Headquarters in a statement.
The investigation began when private security guards at the airport detected anomalies in the daily traffic of some vehicles in the facilities.
After several months of discreet surveillance, the agents focused the investigation on a person who had a company dedicated to the rental and parking of private vehicles that were guarded while their owners were abroad.
This individual had a tent in his charge, located in the vicinity of the airport, which he used as a warehouse, a place where he temporarily deposited the vehicles left by his clients, normally of Belgian origin.
The agents confirmed that this person moved the vehicles he was responsible for into the airport’s public car park and remained parked there for long periods of time. Once the investigation was advanced, the agents discovered that this person had a perfectly designed network that did not raise suspicions.
His modus operandi consisted of introducing a vehicle into the airport car park with false licence plates and parking it perfectly in a space. When he got out of this vehicle, he took the false registration plates to put them on another vehicle that he was in charge of and that had been parked in the parking lot for months.
He then moved the cars to his tent to wash and prepare them for delivery to the owners, who would arrive a few days later.
In addition, it became clear that this person circumvented the licence plate reader security system that the facilities have to pay the minimum amount of 10 or 15 minutes per stay in the car park, when in reality the vehicles had been parked in the car park for months and in some cases an entire year.
The arrest of this person was carried out when he was about to make a change of vehicles inside the parking lot, it was then that the police located a sophisticated licence plate holder system, easy to fasten that allowed it to be quickly removed and placed on another car without raising suspicion and without using tools.
