Fears over scam calls cyber crime epidemic

A cyber crime epidemic is blighting Britain with millions of scam texts, emails and phone calls being targeted at potential victims every day. Crime editor JON AUSTIN reports.

TECH giant BT is blocking a staggering 32 million fake emails from arriving in people’s accounts every day as the cyber fraud scourge spreads.

The company revealed it intercepts about one billion scam messages a month but cannot stop them all getting through.

Bosses told MPS it also prevents an average of a million hoax phone calls each day and has stopped 285 million dodgy text messages being received since July 2021.

The figures highlight the scale of the problem, with fraud and cyber cases making up about half of all crimes reported.

Now the Bar Council is calling on the Government to reopen Nightingale courts, set up during the pandemic, and use them specifically to hear fraud cases.

An estimated 70 to 80 per cent of cyber scams, involving an increased use of AI, come from abroad.

The figures emerged in the same week a Met Police-led global operation shut down a service used by more than 2,000 criminals to defraud victims through 40,000 websites.

Although it is widely believed the elderly

‘Blocking as many as one billion emails’

are more vulnerable to cyber crime, out of the 70,000 victims from the UK, many were in their in their 20s and 30s.

Labhost was a dark web service set up in 2021 by a criminal cyber network which enabled the creation of “phishing” websites designed to trick victims into revealing personal information such as email addresses, passwords and bank details.

Criminal users were able to use existing sites or request bespoke pages replicating those of trusted brands.

Globally, the service obtained 480,000 card numbers, 64,000 PINS, as well as more than one million passwords.

Last week, 37 suspects were arrested across the UK and by international law enforcement agencies.

BT’S figures were released to a Home Affairs Select Committee inquiry into the scale of fraud in the UK.

Its submission said that it had blocked more than 134 million international scam calls since July 2022.

It added: “We are also blocking as many as one billion spam emails from reaching customers per month.

“Although we are blocking huge numbers of scam calls and SMSS we cannot guarantee we can identify and block all: some will inevitably continue to get through.”

The number of scam texts reported being received by customers is about 20,000 per month, with BT’S contact centres receiving an average of 3,500 calls per week from customers worried about fraud.

About 6,000 BT or EE customers were victims of fraud relating to their account in the past year, with the most common type being identity fraud, enabling a scammer to purchase a handset or SIM in their name.

Facebook and Instagram owner Meta said in a submission that it removed 827 million fake accounts used in potential fraud in the last three months of 2023.

Google said in its submission it is having to develop new tech to identify “deepfakes” – digitally manipulated images and audio of events or people – being used to crack into bank accounts.

Nick France, chief technology officer at US security firm Sectigo, said: “Recently an experiment proved that AI can produce convincing deepfakes capable of bypassing voice recognition for online banking.

“People think phone scams that successfully manipulate someone’s voice is Mission Impossible but the reality is that AI deepfake voice technology is more democratised than we like to believe.”

MPS also want to find out why only around one per cent of police resources are

devoted to fraud when it makes up so much of overall crime. Tamas Kadar, CEO of SEON Fraud Fighters, said: “Numerous organisations are tasked with combating fraud. While this looks good on paper, the disjointed nature has led to issues with co-ordination, capacity, and capability.

“It will be interesting to see if the Government’s launch of Stop! Think Fraud in February has made any difference.” And

Matt Aldridge, of Opentext Cybersecurity, said: “We are in a perfect storm of fraud and cyber crime. As technology advances, so do the capabilities of criminals, and the accessibility of advanced capabilities increases to criminals, who need increasingly low technical skill levels to get started.

“Over recent years, online crime has been accelerated dramatically with the rise of cryptocurrency and now we are moving

into the AI age.” One repeat fraud victim said that she had no idea how crooks had hacked her account.

The woman, from Manchester, said someone in Essex hacked her Just Eat account and ordered food with her card.

In a second fraud, her Simply Be account was accessed to order four Toshiba televisions, also for the address in Essex.

She said: “The fraudster left their address on my account and I provided this evidence to both the police and Action Fraud, who told me there was nothing they could do.”

Action Fraud receives crime reports but it has been criticised because only a fraction are referred to police for investigation.

The victim suffered a third attempted hack when the same perpetrator tried to order goods from hervery account.

She added: “This was stopped by Very but none of these should have occurred. I can’t believe how easily people can make fraudulent orders using others’ details.”

Helen Burrows, policy director at BT/EE, said: “We are the first line of defence against a tidal wave of fraudulent activity. In March alone we blocked more than 10 million fraudulent attacks.”

She warned the most common types of

SMS scams include missed delivery and banking text scams, encouraging recipients to click links that mimic legitimate websites or to call a scammer-controlled phone number imitating a legitimate call centre.

She said: “Another key method used by scammers includes ‘Hi Mum and Dad’ scams, targeting parents by sending messages purporting to be their child in need.

“We have also seen an increase in impersonation scams, where criminals pretend to be bank employees, utility service representatives, or even company CEOS to access sensitive banking information.

“UK Finance estimates that bank or CEO impersonations cost people £44million in the first six months of 2023.

“Over the past few months, we’ve seen an increase in deepfake scams. They are particularly disturbing in the hands of scammers, who use them to trick victims into parting with their personal information.the number of deepfake videos available is increasing by 900 per cent annually. Scammers prey on trust. Deepfake technology can be incredibly convincing.”

The National Crime Agency told MPS that because most cyber fraud is based overseas, it has over 150 officers deployed in 50 countries, providing coverage to over 130 nations and jurisdictions assessed to be having a significant impact on fraud in the UK.”

With up to 300 fraud victims a year considering suicide, it will lobby the Sentencing Council to give more recognition to nonfinancial impacts.

A Home Office spokesman said: “Our decisive action to combat fraud has seen it reduced by 13 per cent in the past year.

“We have passed the Online Safety Act, agreed a world-first Online Fraud Charter, launched the national Stop! Think Fraud public awareness campaign and we are ready to go further.

We are investing £100million to launch a National Fraud Squad to investigate more criminals, while also undertaking an independent review to identify how more cases can be taken to court.”

‘We have seen rise in impersonation scams’