Police in London say they have taken down a website called iSpoof and smashed an international fraud operation that may have claimed more than 200,000 fraud victims in Britain.
The Metropolitan Police said victims are thought to have lost tens of millions of pounds and those running iSpoof made £3.2 million ($3.88 million) over 20 months.
Losses reported to Action Fraud from iSpoof calls total £48 million ($58 million), but this is believed to be an underestimate of the true losses incurred.
More than 100 people have been arrested in Britain, most of them on suspicion of perpetrating fraud.
The Met said they are contacting more than 70,000 phone numbers which have been contacted by one of the iSpoof suspects.
Scotland Yard said criminals pretended to be employees of Barclays, Santander, HSBC, Lloyds, Halifax, First Direct, Natwest, Nationwide, and TSB and rang up unsuspecting people.
Police said iSpoof, which had been running since June 2021, enabled criminals to appear as if they were calling from banks, tax offices, and other official bodies, a practice known as “spoofing.”
The Metropolitan Police’s Cyber Crime Unit worked with the FBI, Eurojust, and law enforcement authorities in the Netherlands and Ukraine and took down the website this week.
Earlier this month a man believed to have been running iSpoof was arrested in east London. He has been charged with a number of offences and remanded in custody.
It was the culmination of what the Met called Operation Elaborate.
‘One of the Greatest Challenges for Law Enforcement’
The Commissioner of the Met, Sir Mark Rowley, said, “The exploitation of technology by organised criminals is one of the greatest challenges for law enforcement in the 21st century.”He added: “Together with the support of partners across UK policing and internationally, we are reinventing the way fraud is investigated. The Met is targeting the criminals at the centre of these illicit webs that cause misery for thousands.”
The Met said fraudsters used iSpoof to disguise their own phone numbers and appear as if they were calling from a trusted organisation, like a bank. The fraudsters paid the operators of iSpoof in cryptocurrency.
The fraudsters then rang people and tried to trick them into handing over money or giving out their pin numbers or pass codes to bank accounts.
When successful the fraudsters obtained an average of £10,000 ($12,100) per call.
The police say 10 million fraudulent calls were made globally using iSpoof, with 3.5 million of those in Britain.
Detectives said more than 200,000 individuals in the UK were targeted and they said they would be texting thousands of victims, many of whom would be unaware they have been defrauded.
The Met said the iSpoof website server contained 70 million rows of data and thousands of bitcoin records.
They said there are 59,000 suspects and they are prioritising UK-based fraudsters and those who spent at least £100 ($120) of bitcoin on iSpoof.
Suspects’ details have also been shared with law enforcement partners in the Netherlands, France, Australia, and the Republic of Ireland.
Commander Nik Adams, from the City of London Police, said, “Collaborative and proactive operations like this to tackle fraud are vitally important in clamping down on criminals and preventing innocent members of the public from being targeted for their hard-earned money.”
The report also said: “There is currently an epidemic of fraud in England and Wales. The level of fraud has been increasing year on year and this growth accelerated during the pandemic to an unprecedented level. As the country emerges from the COVID-19 pandemic, there are no signs of a reversal in the upward trend.”
The committee, which is chaired by Conservative MP Sir Bob Neill, said, “If the government is serious in its ambition to reduce fraud, it needs to ensure it is allocated sufficient resourcing within police budgets to help identify and prosecute crimes as well as prevent these crimes from occurring.”
The iSpoof fraud is a variation of so-called boiler room frauds, in which criminals pose as stockbrokers or financial advisers who call unsuspecting people and offer them a “unique opportunity” to invest, usually in something which has an extremely high return.
