‘Phone firms must do more to stop NHS vaccine scams’

Crime agency chief says perpetrators are getting more sophisticated in their efforts to entrap victims

A NATIONAL CRIME AGENCY chief has criticised mobile phone companies for failing to crack down on spoof callers.

Graeme Biggar, director general of the National Economic Crime Centre, said the firms must do more to stop criminals posing as authority figures to demand money from their victims.

If follows a worrying surge in Covidrelated scams, with sophisticated emails and text messages offering vaccines for a fee. The problem has become so significant that the NHS has joined law enforcement and security agencies to warn people about con artists who are exploiting the rollout.

Mr Biggar said criminals are tricking people into believing their call is authentic by using “legitimate” numbers to contact their victims.

Once a victim has answered a call, the scammer will offer to ring them back on an “office number”. They then use software to make it appear they are ringing back from a professional number, for example, that of a government agency. He said this adds legitimacy to the call and means that people are more likely to comply with instructions.

“There isn’t a silver bullet that would just stop the spoofing of phone numbers,” he told BBC Radio 4. “We need to see a more consistent effort from phone companies – more working with law enforcement, more work on technical solutions to stop the spoof calls, more sharing of information with each other.”

Mr Biggar said the use of spoof numbers means people should not automatically trust the number that appears on their phone when it rings.

“It is easy for criminals to spoof that number,” he said. “Ofcom has been working with the phone companies to look at technical solutions. It’s now impossible to spoof numbers from public-facing outgoing landlines from banks, HMRC and the National Crime Agency. But criminals have shifted their methodology and are using almost any number that can be found on a government website. The receiving phone “believes” the information it is sent from the sending phone number.”

In January, the NHS warned that criminals were attempting – and sometimes succeeding – to steal cash or take personal details from people keen to be inoculated.

In one case, a man in London knocked on the door of a 92-year-old woman and administered her with a fake vaccine before taking a £160 payment, which he told her would be reimbursed by the NHS.

In other cases, people reported suspicious texts with a link to a booking site that mimicked an NHS page, but went on to ask for personal details including bank account numbers.

As of Jan 10, Action Fraud, the national reporting centre for fraud and cyber crime, had received 65 reports in relation to the Covid-19 vaccine.

The vaccine is only available on the NHS, and you will never be asked to pay for it or to provide bank details. Anything that suggests otherwise is a fraud.

Steve Baker MP, a member of the Treasury select committee, said: “It’s outrageous that so few resources are given to the police to tackle it. It’s like we’re paddling in a sewer of fraud and we need to deal with it. I’m very exorcised about it indeed. We’re going to have to accept that for a few years we can’t trust caller IDs and that’s awful, but necessary.

“These are sophisticated people and they’re using technology many people won’t expect. No one should be embarrassed if they have been caught out. I’ve had constituents who have had lifechanging frauds.”