Phone scam ring busted

Uk-led probe disrupts global racket that targeted millions

LONDON: UK police said their biggest ever counter-fraud operation had disrupted an international criminal network targeting hundreds of thousands of victims in millions of spam phone calls.

The Metropolitan Police spearheaded the 18-month global probe into the ispoof.cc website, working with Europol, the FBI and other law enforcement agencies worldwide.

A total of 142 people have been arrested, including one of its alleged London-based administrators.

Suspects were nabbed in Australia, France, Ireland and the Netherlands, while servers were shuttered in the Netherlands and Ukraine.

UK police believe organised crime groups are linked to the website and its tens of thousands of users. The site enables users to access software tools to illicitly obtain victims’ bank account funds and commit other fraud.

Met Commissioner Mark Rowley said the investigation signalled “a different approach” to criminals exploiting technology.

“This is about starting from the organised criminals that actually drive and create the fraud that we see in the world around us,” he told reporters yesterday.

The London force – the UK’S largest – said in the year to August, suspects paid to access the website and make more than 10 million fraudulent calls worldwide.

Around 40% were in the United States. More than a third were in the UK, targeting 200,000 potential victims there alone.

Fraud detection agencies have so far recorded £48mil (Rm262mil) in losses in the UK alone. Victims lost an average £10,000 (RM54,600). The largest single theft was worth £3mil (Rm16mil). Losses to victims worldwide are estimated at more than £100mil (Rm546mil).

“Because fraud is vastly underreported, the full amount is believed to be much higher,” the Met said.

Those behind the site earned almost £3.2mil (Rm17mil) from it, the force added.

Only around 5,000 British victims have so far been identified, though the Met’s investigation has yielded the phone numbers of over 70,000 potential victims, who have yet to be contacted.