A website used by criminals to withdraw money and access bank accounts was taken down this week in an international operation, the biggest ever in the fight against fraud for British police, Scotland Yard announced Thursday. More than 100 people have been arrested in the UK alone, mostly for fraud, according to Scotland Yard. Among them is the alleged organizer of the iSpoof site, Teejai Fletcher, 34, who has been charged and is in pretrial detention.
Other suspects identified in the country have been reported to investigative services in the Netherlands, Australia, France and Ireland. The number of possible victims is more than 200,000, and the damage is in the tens of millions of pounds in the UK alone, according to London police.
Three quarters of calls to the United States or the United Kingdom
The iSpoof site allowed criminals to impersonate representatives of major banks by displaying trusted phone numbers (banks, tax offices, or official bodies) to withdraw money or passwords over the phone or via SMS to access accounts. Scammers using the site would pay for it in Bitcoin, between £150 and £5,000 depending on the service. In one year, until last August, 10 million calls were made worldwide, 40% to the United States, a third to the United Kingdom.
Helen Rance, London Police Cyber Crime Manager, noted that by “dismantling iSpoof, we have prevented more crime and prevented scammers from targeting future victims.” “We have his contact details and we are working hard to locate him, wherever he is,” she told users of the site.
More than 50 million euros in damages in total
“The exploitation of technology by organized crime is one of the most important challenges… of the 21st century,” said London’s new police chief Mark Rowley. “With the support of our partners in the UK and internationally, we are reinventing the way fraud is investigated,” he added in a statement, welcoming the takedown of this site which “allowed criminals to trick people innocent on a grand scale.”
This vast operation was carried out in coordination with Europol, Eurojust and the FBI. Computer servers were shut down in the Netherlands and Ukraine. Reported average damage is estimated at £10,000 (€11,600), for a reported total of £48 million (€55 million) in the UK.
Source: BFM TV
