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Police bust global cyber gang accused of industrial-scale fraud

21 hours ago
By Tom Symonds,
Home Affairs correspondent

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BBC Suspect arrested in Bromley, LondonBBC
Police made arrests in a series of raids, including this one in Bromley, south-east
London
Police have taken down a gang accused of using a technology service that helped
criminals use fraudulent text messages to steal from victims.

They have arrested 37 people worldwide and are contacting victims.

Officers say younger people who grew up with the internet were the most likely to
fall for the "phishing" scam.

The technology allowed scammers without technical skills to bombard victims with
messages designed to trick them into making payments online.

Police targeted the gang's site, LabHost, which helped criminals send the messages
and direct victims to fake websites appearing to be legitimate online payment or
shopping services.

It had enabled the criminals to steal identity information, including 480,000 card
numbers and 64,000 Pin codes, known in criminal slang as "fullz data", the police
said.

Detectives do not know how much money was stolen but estimate the LabHost site made
nearly £1m ($1.25m) in profits.

Banks warn of big increase in online scams

Warning UK losing £2,300 per minute to fraud
Metropolitan Police Deputy Commissioner Dame Lynne Owens said: "You are more likely
to be a victim of fraud than any other crime.

"Our approach is to be more precise and targeted, with a clear focus on those
enabling online fraud to be carried out on an international scale."

National Economic Crime Centre director Adrian Searle said: "Technology is enabling
crime to be delivered at scale in an almost industrial fashion."

And LabHost had given criminals without technical skills the opportunity to "buy
them off the shelf online and use them against victims in the UK and elsewhere".
The arrests were the result of a two-year operation involving the Metropolitan
Police, National Crime Agency, City of London Police and law-enforcement bodies in
17 countries.

In the UK, 24 suspects were taken into custody, with arrests at Luton and
Manchester airports.

Worldwide, 70 properties were searched and one British man charged.

Text messages
In the UK, 70,000 victims are believed to have been tricked into giving their
details online.

About 25,000, who have been identified, will be sent text messages warning them
which fake online payment services and shopping sites could have taken their money.

They will be advised to go to a Metropolitan Police website for advice.

Their cases have been reported to fraud investigators.

And officers say their personal details found in a dump of data, obtained from
LabHost, have been "secured".

Personalised videos
Investigators also seized the email addresses of 800 criminals paying up to £300 a
month to use the LabHost service.

And they will be sent personalised videos making clear police know who they are and
what they have been doing.

The strategy, which follows advice from behavioural psychologists, is designed to

undermine criminal confidence in the security of scam services.

Metropolitan Police On Tuesday police took control of the service, and switched it
to a new page warning users that law enforcement bodies had infiltrated LabHost's
servers.Metropolitan Police
Law-enforcement agencies have taken control of the site
The gang's activities were discovered in 2022 by the Cyber Defence Alliance, a
small team of investigators funded by UK financial bodies to infiltrate criminal
networks on the dark web.

An alliance official said: "Unless we build a network to defeat a criminal network,

we are going to be overwhelmed."

This investigation is an example of a new approach involving police, the National

Crime Agency and banking security experts to target criminals offering services to
other criminals.

In November 2022, police took down iSpoof, another "crime as a service" operation,
which allowed criminals to cold-call victims to take their money.

Tejay Fletcher, 35, who founded the service, responsible for fraud totalling £100m,
was jailed for 13 years in 2023.

And in February 2024, the National Crime Agency took down LockBit, "the world's
most harmful cyber-crime group", which had used ransomware attacks costing victims
billions of pounds.

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