Digital Scams in Cuba: Lurking on Your Phone
Digital crimes are growing rapidly in Cuba, taking advantage of the limited digital and financial literacy of a large part of the population and police inaction.
HAVANA TIMES – After hanging up, Claudia Maria Rey wondered for a moment whether she had been overly suspicious. But her husband soon confirmed that she had made the right decision. First they had tried to scam her, and later him, both with the same far-fetched story: supposedly, they had been allocated a photovoltaic system consisting of two batteries and a solar panel, but before they could pick it up, they had to send some information through the Transfermóvil payment platform. Had they done so, they would have lost money and probably control of their digital accounts as well.
Like any good scam, the story had an air of plausibility. In recent months, the Cuban government has given thousands of healthcare and education workers, as well as people with chronic illnesses, the opportunity to purchase photovoltaic systems at subsidized prices. The intention is to continue those sales so that more families can live relatively normal lives despite the blackouts, Energy and Mines Minister Vicente La O Levy said a few weeks ago. It is a source of hope that scammers are exploiting to make a killing.
“They couldn’t fool my husband because he studies electrical engineering and started asking them technical questions they couldn’t answer. In the end, when they could no longer keep up the lie, they were the ones who hung up on him,” Claudia recounted in a Facebook group, where she also shared the phone number from which they had been contacted and the account to which the scammers had asked them to transfer money.
“I wonder what the authorities are doing about this. It’s long past time to create a division to handle these cases. After all, they have the criminal’s cell phone number. That should mean 10 years in prison, no trial needed. I don’t know what they’re waiting for to put an immediate stop to this scourge. We’re a country full of laws, and none of them are enforced,” Eric Enrique Sedeño commented beneath the post.
His complaint is becoming increasingly common in Cuba, where digital crimes are growing rapidly, taking advantage of the limited digital and financial literacy of a large part of the population and police inaction.
Several methods of operation are already considered “classics.” There is, for example, the supposed mistaken transfer scam, in which the scammer contacts the victim asking them to return part of some money they claim to have accidentally sent.
“Keep the rest for the inconvenience,” they told Ines, a woman from Camagüey who lost nearly 20,000 pesos that way. “Since they sent me a confirmation message that looked like one from Transfermovil, I wasn’t suspicious and made the ‘refund’ without first checking my balance,” she lamented.
Another common scam involves a WhatsApp verification code. Using various pretexts, scammers persuade people to give them access to their accounts on the messaging platform.
“And once they’re in, they start writing to the victim’s contacts, asking to borrow money or charging them for goods and services they never received,” IT specialist and influencer Luis Manresa recently warned.
In this latter type of scam, fake offers of photovoltaic systems and electric tricycles have become common. These are two of the most sought-after items in Cuba today, as the country faces a severe oil blockade imposed by the Trump administration.
“They take advantage of people who have emigrated and want to help their families on the Island,” Manresa said in a video in which he exposed a supposed solar-panel seller who, throughout their conversation, tried to get him to share his WhatsApp access code.
“Once they get it, they write to the contacts who are going to pay for the purchase, making them believe the delivery has already been made, then they collect the money and disappear,” Manresa explained.
That Facebook video includes a thank-you comment from one of his followers, who managed to avoid being scammed thanks to his advice.
“As soon as I heard it, I wrote to my husband to warn him not to pay under any circumstances if they sent him photos of the roof with the panels installed. He first had to talk to me by video call. And that’s exactly what happened. This morning they wrote to him and showed him photos of the panels already installed, when in reality none of the supposed installers had even shown up at the house. Because we didn’t know how the scam worked, we could have lost $8,000.”
Other Cases of Police Negligence
“It’s Not Sufficient Evidence”,that is what police told Alexis, the co-owner of a food business in Camagüey who was robbed in mid-June, losing an electric tricycle, two refrigerators and a significant amount of money. But everything had been captured by his surveillance cameras.
With those recordings, it should have been easy to identify the criminals—who had committed the crime without covering their faces—or so he thought. Nothing could have been further from the truth.
“They refused to accept the video. ‘It’s not sufficient evidence,’ the officer in charge of the case told me. He didn’t even react when, a few days later, someone called me offering to return the tricycle and refrigerators if I paid a ransom. Aware of how little he and the other investigators wanted to work, I even brought him the name and address of the person in whose name the phone line used to contact me was registered. But it was pointless. Since the person isn’t currently in the province, the police simply told me they have no way to track him. The absurd thing is that all they would have to do is go to ETECSA [the telephone company] and ask them to locate where that cell phone is connecting from.”
The authorities’ passivity in dealing with ordinary crimes contrasts sharply with their effectiveness when cases that have political implications. Unlike Felix’s case and other similar ones, in which security-camera footage has not been accepted as evidence, in January 2020 such recordings were considered valid in solving a series of acts of vandalism in Havana.
Digital analysis of the images proved decisive in the arrest and conviction of two men who had damaged several busts and signs bearing political propaganda. Around that time, national television aired a program in which police experts demonstrated procedures for identifying suspects from low-resolution video footage. Calls between the suspects and people outside Cuba, made through supposedly secure messaging platforms, had also been intercepted.
“When they’re interested, they can solve these cases. The technological surveillance programs needed to track and identify criminals exist, and in Cuba the government exercises extraordinarily effective control over the population. The problem is that these crimes are not a priority for the authorities,” said Yasser Hernandez, a telecommunications engineer pursuing a master’s degree in data protection in Mexico.
The main difference between Cuba and other countries, he said, is that in the latter, governments—and the police in particular—must be accountable to citizens for their actions.
While police in Cuba resist accepting complaints against digital scammers, crimes of this kind continue to increase, even affecting the State itself.
In June, the state-owned fuel company CUPET reported that its digital sales website had been impersonated and that a WhatsApp group falsely presenting itself as official had been created. The scammers had already managed to deceive numerous Cubans living abroad, charging them in dollars for the supposed delivery of liquefied-gas cylinders to their relatives in Cuba.
It is not the first time something like this has happened, and it will predictably not be the last. All it takes is a little ingenuity and very little shame to make money without much effort—and with almost no risk of facing consequences, given Cuba’s current situation.