The UK's National Crime Agency (NCA) has shut down an outfit called Russian Coms - a call-spoofing service believed to have swindled hundreds of thousands of victims.

The agency also arrested at least four suspects thought to be involved in the fraudulent operation, which spanned more than 100 countries. Despite the moniker, all four of the arrested men are Brits.

In March, the NCA detained two men, aged 26 and 28, in Newham, London, who are suspected to be the platform's developers and administrators. The platform was shut down that same month.

Then in April, police arrested a third man from Newham, age 28, who is accused of being an affiliate and a courier for the handsets required to use the spoofing service. All three have been released on conditional bail.

Earlier this week, one of the "hundreds" of alleged scammers suspected of using the spoofing service was arrested in Potters Bar, England, by the police's Eastern Region Special Operations Unit.

A global law enforcement effort will target additional users in the upcoming months, we're told.

An estimated 170,000 people in the UK alone are thought to be victims, according to the NCA.

Russian Coms, established in 2021, helped criminals to disguise their true identities and appear to be legitimate callers from banks, telecom companies, law enforcement agencies, and other organizations. Criminals used their spoofed identities to drain victims' bank accounts and steal their personal information.

The con worked like this: A criminal using the service would spoof the phone number of a bank, for example, then call a victim and attempt to trick the mark into transferring their money to a new account by claiming their current account had been subject to fraudulent activity.

Crooks paid for the service, which saw them provided with a smartphone - or, more recently, a web app.

The device, which could only be used to make spoofed calls, looked like a normal smartphone and came preloaded with phony applications in case law enforcement authorities took possession of it. It also came with several VPN apps so the criminal using the phone could hide their IP address during their dirty work. A burn app to wipe the handset instantly was also loaded.

A six-month contract to use the service cost between £1,200 ($1,500) and £1,400 ($1,800). For those sums, users were offered 24-hour support, hold music while they waited for help, encrypted calls, a voice changer, and the ability to place international calls, according to ads for the fraud service on Snapchat, Instagram, and Telegram.

The newer web app allowed full access to the Russian Coms web phone for £350 ($446) per month - paid in cryptocurrency, natch.

Between 2021 and 2024, Russian Coms users made more than 1.3 million calls to 500,000 unique UK phone numbers, according to the NCA. The average loss, based on just the victims who reported the scams, exceeded £9,400 ($12,000).

However, both the victim count and losses are likely much larger, as the NCA says calls were made to 107 countries including the UK, US, New Zealand, Norway, France, and the Bahamas.

"Criminals are increasingly using technology to carry out fraud and other crimes on an industrial scale, causing very real harm to victims in the UK and across the world," declared Adrian Searle, director of the National Economic Crime Centre within the NCA, in a statement.

Fraud accounts for about 40 percent of all crime against individuals in England and Wales, and more than 80 percent of it is likely technology-enabled, according to the NCA.

"The NCA and our partners here in the UK and overseas are going after both the criminals and the technology they exploit," Searle added. ®

https://www.theregister.com//2024/08/02/russian_coms_phone_spoofing_service_shutdown/