A gang accused of using a phishing scam to steal money from victims has been taken down by police, who arrested 37 people worldwide. The scammers targeted victims using fraudulent text messages to coax payments from them online. Younger people were found to be the most likely to fall for the scam, with the technology employed by the gang allowing non-technical criminals to bombard victims with convincing messages. The gang’s site, LabHost, enabled the criminals to steal identity information, including card numbers and PIN codes. Though police aren’t sure how much money was stolen, they estimate that the profits from the LabHost site totaled nearly £1m.
The victims of the scam have been contacted by police, with 70,000 people believed to have been tricked into providing their details online of which, 25,000 have been identified so far. These people will receive a text warning them of fake online payment services and shopping sites that could have taken their money. They will also be advised to visit a Metropolitan Police website for further advice. The arrests came as the result of a two-year operation involving a number of law enforcement bodies across 17 countries.
LabHost was targeted as part of an approach to take down criminals enabling online fraud on an international scale. Speaking about the operation, Dame Lynne Owens, Metropolitan Police Deputy Commissioner, warned that people are more likely to be victims of fraud than any other crime. National Economic Crime Centre director Adrian Searle added that technology is enabling crime to be delivered at scale in an almost industrial fashion.
The strategy for dismantling the gang involved seizing the email addresses of 800 criminals paying up to £300 a month to use the LabHost service, which will be used to send personalised videos making it clear that police know who they are and what they have been doing. The approach is designed in part to undermine criminal confidence in the security of scam services offered on the dark web. The gang’s activities were discovered in 2022 by the Cyber Defence Alliance, a group of investigators funded by UK financial bodies to infiltrate criminal networks on the dark web
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