By the A.M. Costa Rica staff

The Penitentiary Police announced that during July 259 complaints were registered for calls from scammers, apparently from the prisons. The number of complaints was reduced to 159 cases in August and to 65 cases in September.

According to the police report, cell seizure work in prisons has been done with the support of agents of the Judicial Investigation Agency. "The result of the seizures caused the activity of the scams by these calls, to fall from July," said the police in its statement.

According to the statistics of the prison police, in June 2018, 620 cases of telephone scams were reported. During the same period this year, more than the double the number of complaints, some 1,387, were reported.

However, as of August in which a more intense process of cell review and cell phone seizures was implemented, these numbers of complaints fell considerably, said police.

"Although not all scams of this kind are generated from prisons, the truth is that the decrease coincided with a series of work undertaken by the Penitentiary Police in coordination with judicial agents and the Prosecutor's Office in the last quarter to hit the gangs operating from prisons," said the police in its statement.

According to Pablo Bertozzi, the director of the Penitentiary Police, this positive result is due to the new strategy to increase controls and detect cellphone smuggling in prisons.

"The work of the Penitentiary Police is stopping with these issues in prisons," said Bertozzi.

During this year, from January to September, the Police reported 2,412 cell phones seized. Of these, the majority are from the Alajuela jail.

According to police statistics, since 2015 15,341 cell phones have been confiscated in prisoner cells.

The police ask people to avoid being scammed with calls from scammers. The best way to avoid a scam is to never give by phone, bank account data or access codes to computer equipment, the police said.

Currently, cell phone providers companies are in the process of blocking the cellular signal in the prisons.

According to the Ministry of Justice, the agreement with the company that will be in charge of blocking access to make cell phone calls from prisons throughout the country will be announced in the next few days.


On August, as A.M. Costa Rica previously reported, a video was filmed showing several prisoners making calls, posing as bank officials to defraud to other people.

In the video, a group of prisoners who were in the jail of San Rafael in the province of Alajuela, use cell phones to call people and scam them.

According to the ministry, the video that is circulating on social networks is not recent.

The Penitentiary Police have already identified all the people who appear in the video; also the person who made the recording. Those prisoners are serving time for convictions such as homicide, theft, rape, and sale of drugs.

"Because some of them were transferred to other prisons, the authorities estimate that the video was filmed months ago,"  said the ministry in its statement.

The video that shows several prisoners making calls to third parties can be seen on the Facebook page of Programa Horizontes here.*




----------------------------

---

---

---