Airport arrests in police swoop on scammer website
A UK-FOUNDED website used to defraud victims on an industrial scale has been infiltrated - leading to scores of arrests around the world, the Metropolitan Police has said.
As many as 70,000 UK victims were tricked by the site’s scams, which obtained 480,000 card numbers and 64,000 PINs globally.
Law enforcement agencies have arrested 37 suspects across the UK and around the world, including at Manchester and Luton airports, as well as in Essex and London.
LabHost, a scammer site set up in 2021 by a criminal network, enabled users to set up phishing websites designed to trick victims into revealing personal information such as email addresses, passwords, and bank details.
Phishing is a form of scam where attackers deceive people into revealing sensitive information.
Criminal subscribers were able to log on and choose from existing sites or request bespoke pages replicating those of trusted brands including banks, healthcare agencies and postal services. LabHost even provided templates and an easy to follow tutorial allowing would-be fraudsters with limited IT knowledge to use the service.
At the end of the tutorial, a robotic voice told fraudsters: “Stay safe and good spamming.”
By the beginning of 2024, more than 40,000 fraudulent sites had been created and 2,000 users were registered and paying a monthly subscription fee. LabHost provided its subscribers with fake profiles for 170 companies to trick victims, including 47 based in the UK.
Those subscribing to the “worldwide membership”, meaning they could target victims internationally, paid between £200 and £300 a month. Since creation, the site has received just under £1 million in payments from criminal users.
After the platform was seized, 800 users received a message telling them that police “know who they are and what they’ve been doing”.
Police hope they can dissuade former LabHost subscribers from further offending by creating the same level of fear about their information as their victims.
As part of Operation Stargrew, detectives have contacted up to 25,000 victims in the UK.
Dame Lynne Owens, deputy commissioner of the Metropolitan Police Service, said: “Online fraudsters think they can act with impunity. They believe they can hide behind digital identities and platforms such as LabHost and have absolute confidence these sites are impenetrable by policing. But this operation and others over the last year show how law enforcement worldwide can, and will, come together with one another and private sector partners to dismantle international fraud networks at source.”
Online fraudsters think they can act with impunity and hide behind digital platforms Dame Lynne Owens of Metropolitan Police