Scammers pretended to be government workers and used a lengthy telephone interview technique last year to conduct a series of frauds against business people, investigators revealed Tuesday. Many of the calls came from prison, and the crooks used real government web pages to lull victims into posting their bank account details, including passwords, they added.

Spokespersons from the Judicial Investigation Organization, the Ministry of Economy and the Ministry of Finance renewed their call Tuesday for the public to be alert for this type of fraud.

Four representatives of the three agencies gave more details Tuesday on how the scams was made. A.M. Costa Rica initially reported on the scams Tuesday*.

Appearing for the press were Nogui Acosta, a vice minister of Revenue, Laura Pacheco of the  Minister of Economy and two specialists of the judicial police cybercrime unit, Jonathan Chinchilla and Karla Calderon. According to the specialists, from April to October of last year, business people lost ¢500 million colones (about $830,550) to the fraudsters.

Scammers were calling business people pretending to be executives of government agencies, such as the Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of Economy.

The cybercrime investigators said they have detected that most of these scams were made from jail. Because of this, the officials call on the public to reject calls from any person who is introducing himself as an official of a government institution or any bank. They also recommend avoid giving personal information by telephone. In the case of suspicious calls the public should make a report directly to the agency or bank involved.

When there is a suspicion of this type of scam, the specialists recommended not to return the call to the number given by the person making the contact because scammers use programs to simulate the real phone numbers of an institution. For that reason any call received from any bank or government institution must be ignored, they said.

According to Acosta, his Ministry of Finance has been informing the public for a year about this type of fraud. "For more than a year the Ministry of Finance has been issuing different alerts to the public through the website, social networks and national media, on this type of scams," he said.

Executives of the Ministry of Finance “do not make any type of telephone calls to set appointments, or request personal information as passwords, bank account information, or home visits to check the computers,” he said. “The procedures to start using electronic invoices must be carried out only through the Virtual Tax Administration System (known as ATV), which must only be accessed on the Ministry's official website.” Discussion the new electronic invoicing system and using the ministry website were among of the ways scammers got victims involved in the telephone conversations.

Scammers also used websites at the Ministry of Economy, including the PYME enrollment page. That program is for small and medium enterprises, called PYME in a Spanish acronym. In some cases the telephone scammers directed their victims to enroll at the real government site as a way of eliminating suspicions.

The cybercrime specialists were emphatic that members of the public should never give by phone or email, personal information, passwords or bank account information.

Government officials became aware of the scams because technicians detected an application that crooks could use to enter the website of the Ministry of Finance to access citizens' bank account information. This application was blocked, and the ministry site has new control systems to prevent the leakage of information, officials said Tuesday.

The specialists said they detected that scammers use information from the Integrated System of Public Purchases (known as SICOP), to contact the victims. That is another government data base.