Murcia police rescue homeless man from rubbish bin

A 48-year-old man in Murcia, Spain climbed into a bin to take what he thought was a bag of old clothes. He then had to call for help when he couldn’t get out again.

Photo courtesy Local Police, Murcia

Passersby called the police to the Vistabella neighborhood in Murcia recently after they heard the man yelling for help from inside the rubbish bin. He had squeezed through a small gap to get into the bin and became trapped as the bin has a tilting door mechanism, designed to prevent people from doing exactly what the man had done. This type of protection on the bins has become common practice in Spain after the country’s continuing economic crisis.

The man is reportedly of Romanian origins and survives on the streets and in homeless shelters in the city and he believed the bag in the bin contained old clothes being sent for recycling. Apparently, besides getting stuck in the bin, he was wrong in his assumptions. José Elias, a spokesman for the Murcia Local Police said on Twitter that they have no idea how he managed to get into the bin, while sharing photos of the incident. 

Ayer agentes del GESC rescatan a un hombre que quedó atrapado en el interior de un contenedor soterrado en el Bº Vistabella. pic.twitter.com/eXBx3sPpUH

— Policía Local Murcia (@MurciaPolicia) October 19, 2016

Reportedly police could not free the man and had to call council workers to open the container and get the man out. In total he spent around half an hour trapped in the rubbish bin but is believed to be unhurt by the experience.

According to The Local, the National Statistics Agency (INE) says that Murcia is one of the most poverty stricken regions in the country with 31 percent of the population at risk of poverty. Besides the tilting door mechanisms, other councils in Spain have introduced locks on the bins in an attempt to stop people from scavenging.

Source: The Local

Spain hit by two possible Ebola cases

Two people have been admitted to hospital this week with fears that they may be infected with the very contagious Ebola virus.  One is a 13-year-old boy in Mallorca and the other a 24-year-old man in the region of Murcia.  Both apparently flew into Spain in the last three weeks from Lagos in Nigeria.

Both patients are suffering symptoms similar to Ebola, including muscle pain and high temperatures, and are both are being kept in secure units under isolation, which have the necessary infrastructure to deal with highly infectious diseases.

The 13-year-old was taken to the Hospital Son Llàtzer, in Palma de Mallorca in the Balearic Islands, and the 24-year-old was hospitalized at the Hospital de Son Espases. In the meantime, blood samples from both patients have been sent to laboratories in Madrid, where scientists will be able to ascertain whether the two people are actually infected with Ebola.

Reuters is reporting that so far this year, approximately 2,300 people have died in what is the worst Ebola outbreak ever recorded.  While Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea are the worst affected countries, the disease is also spreading to Senegal and Nigeria as sick travelers carry the infection.

Update:

In a later update, it was confirmed that the 13-year-old boy is not suffering from the highly infectious disease.  Also the child was also not infected with malaria, according to doctors.

At present, the 24-year-old Nigerian man remains in isolation.

Sources:

Diario de Mallorca

La Razon

Photo: CC by 2.5 Ayacop

WhatsappSPY: Spanish man arrested for fake spy app on smartphones

A young Spanish man has been arrested for swindling thousands of euros with a fake spy app for accessing instant messaging conversations on smartphones for free. What victims got was something else entirely.

WhatsappSPY was supposed to be an application to install and use to view conversations from other users in real time. However, the fraud involved calling a phone number for an activation code, which actually subscribed the victim to a premium SMS service.

 

Rumors about the existence of the application had been going around the Internet for some time, saying that using the app, a user could access communications made by any person using a smartphone, with only a few simple steps. 

 

After a complaint was lodged by a social network, it was found that the main channel used to access victims for the fraud was by hacking users' profiles on the social media. 

 

The 23-year-old fraudster gained access to more than 11,000 users' profiles. Through these stolen accounts, mass spam messages were sent out to their contact lists to disseminate the information. All links included in the messages looked similar to a genuine social network, easily fooling people accessing them.

 

Users were automatically redirected to websites to facilitate downloading the program, although apparently once downloaded, the program asked them to introduce a mobile number to purchase an activation code. No activation code was ever received, but the owner of the particular mobile phone number was then subscribed to a premium SMS service, with costs of between €1.45 or €7.26 per call, depending on the operator.

 

Billed over a period of two months, profits to the fraudster could exceed €40,000. Researchers tracked the alleged architect of the fraud, a 23-year-old Spanish national, who was arrested by the National Police on July 20. A search of his home computer and four hard drives is being analyzed by specialists.

 

The operation was carried out by agents of the Technological Research Unit of the Judicial Police Commissioner-General in collaboration with the Police Headquarters of Murcia.

To the source: http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/354839