The UK Telegraph reports
Millions of people get phone calls from scammers and wonder who is at the other end.
Now we know: rather than someone in a call centre far away, a “bright young man”…
Millions of people get phone calls from scammers and wonder who is at the other end. Now we know: rather than someone in a call centre far away, a “bright young man” living in a lush flat in London has been unmasked as the mastermind behind so many of these calls.
Tejay Fletcher’s trial exposed how criminals with a simple website bypassed police, phone operators and banks to facilitate “fraud on an industrial scale”, scamming victims out of £100m ($124 million) of their hard earned cash. Fletcher, 35, who ran the website iSpoof.cc, was jailed for 13 years and four months earlier this week following his arrest in 2019 in what is the biggest anti-fraud operation mounted in the UK.
The website allowed criminals to disguise their phone numbers in a process known as “spoofing” and trick unsuspecting people to believe they were being called by their bank or other institutions… The number of people using iSpoof swelled to 69,000 at its peak, with as many as 20 people per minute targeted by callers using the site. More than 10 million fraudulent calls were made using iSpoof in the year to August 2022 — 3.5 million of them in the UK, the prosecution said. More than 200,000 victims in the UK — many of them elderly — lost £43m, while global losses exceeded £100m… The website allowed [its users] to intercept one-time passwords, which were “ironically” introduced by banks to increase their security measures, noted John Ojakovoh, prosecuting…
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