TJ Fletcher “spoofed” for 13 years 4 months. conclusions
London Police said the destruction of poof and the arrest of its administrator and nearly 170 users were the result of the largest ever investigation into a fraudulent group.
The bank is calling you. You have suspicious activity
The administrator of the closed phone number spoofing service poof was sentenced to more than 13 years in prison. 35 year old British citizen TJ Fletcher (Tejay Fletcher) pleaded guilty in April 2023 to a range of cybercrimes, including fraud, possession of illegal property and its transfer to others.
The poof service allowed its customers to substitute phone numbers. This was actively used by various scammers who called the victims allegedly on behalf of banks, tax authorities and other institutions.
The scammers told victims that their funds were at risk due to suspicious activity in their accounts and tricked them into revealing sensitive financial details or transferring money to accounts under their control.
Fraudsters posed as representatives of such banks as Barclays, Santander, HSBC, Lloyds, Halifax, FirstDirect, Natwest, Nationwide and TSB, among others.
However, the anonymity of poof users turned out to be illusory. More than 50,000 users of the service have been identified by law enforcement, and about 200 people, in the UK alone, have been arrested for real fraud using the service. According to the police, about 10 million fraudulent calls worldwide were made through poof in a year, about 3.5 million of them in the UK.
Fletcher was sentenced to 13 years 4 months. The rest are waiting for their turn.
The London police said in a statement that the operation against the poof and its associated gang was the largest anti-fraud investigation of the Metropolitan Police in history.
We keep a million in the bank and plevanto on the law
The poof service was paid. Its users used Bitcoin to buy the number of minutes during which they planned to make fraudulent calls.
The amount of damage, according to investigators, in the UK alone amounted to 48 million pounds (almost $60 million), and in total, the attackers robbed their victims of more than 100 million pounds ($125 million).
Fletcher himself earned about 1.7-1.9 million pounds (more than $2 million) on this service. In addition, he bought expensive cars and watches from manufacturers such as Rolex and Audemars Piguet.
The poof service was liquidated in November 2022 as a result of a massive operation. During it, both the convict and 168 other people were arrested.
More than 30 mobile phones and a wide range of SIM cards were found at Fletcher’s home.
As it has now become known, the Dutch police have been listening to servers in Almere for a long time and collecting information about how the service works and who uses it. British authorities write that a covert operation to spy on poof began in June 2021, which eventually helped investigators to get an idea of the criminal network. Europol joined the investigation in August 2021 to help the UK police collect evidence and data from law enforcement agencies from around the world (specialists from Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Ireland, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Ukraine, the UK and the USA took part in the operation) .
It is also reported that Europol helped to identify additional users of poof, a number of which were already known to law enforcement (due to involvement in other high-profile cybercrime investigations). The Dutch police emphasize that they are now actively deanonymizing more and more users of the service, based on evidence collected from hijacked servers.
“The telephone scam hydra had one head cut off, apparently quite a large one,” says Anastasia Melnikova, director of information security at SEQ. “Law enforcement has shown that the arrogance of cybercriminals is punishable and that even very secretive scammers can be exposed and sent to jail. Without belittling the achievements of the London police, we have to state that this is only one such gang, and others will soon take its place. Their potential victims can reliably protect themselves from telephone scammers only on their own – without succumbing.
