Category: The Authorities

UK Biggest Cyber Criminals Caught

The UK’s biggest ever cyber scammers stole £113m by calling victims pretending to be from their bank. Fraudsters used bin bags full of cash for shopping sprees, bought supercars and a Lahore mansion. The Glasgow-based gang targeted small businesses in telephone fraud scam and they cleared out millions of pounds from their victims’ bank accounts

The ring leader Choudhary has been jailed for 11 years and 14 others also face prison terms.

The Burnley-born fraudster had fleeced over 750 British firms to fund his millionaire playboy lifestyle. Raking in £3million a month by cold-calling bank customers, he ruined hundreds of lives and put small businesses on the brink of bankruptcy – leaving one victim so distraught that she committed suicide.

The Method

Choudhary phoned businesses claiming to be from their bank, saying security on the accounts had been compromised. He got internet bank security details and passwords from employees and emptied their accounts in minutes, blocking phone lines with software to stop contact with the real bank

Unwitting customers were told their accounts had been hacked and were duped into giving their internet banking passwords over the phone.

The cash was withdrawn by ‘money mules’ and moved through transfer exchanges from London to Pakistan and elsewhere. The biggest raid saw £2.2million taken from a solicitor’s firm in minutes

Choudhary used the details to convince businesses he was a genuine bank employee, telling them they had been hacked by ‘someone in Aberdeen’ called ‘King’

Scotland Yard believes at least 750 businesses were affected between January 2013 and October 2015, but there could be countless others. Choudhary targeted customers from Lloyds, Santander, Barclays and Royal Bank of Scotland.

Choudhary grew so rich that he flew his personal valets 8,000 miles across the world to polish his Porsches.

He posed as a music producer and property developer and owned a fleet of expensive cars including a Bentley, Rolls-Royce, Lamborghini and two Porsches.

Choudhary spent millions on a property portfolio in Pakistan, Dubai and Scotland, treated himself to £100,000 shopping trips at Harrods, bought £45,000 Rolex watches and enjoyed luxury holidays in the Middle East.

Conviction

Choudhary was jailed for 11 years. Corrupt Lloyds business adviser, Jones Opare-Addo, was jailed for five years for leaking account details to the gang and setting up accounts to launder cash.

Emma Daramola, 23, was given a two-year suspended sentence for conspiracy to commit fraud by abuse of position for her role as an insider at Lloyds

A long list of accomplices were also jailed.

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The Government’s New Cyber Security Centre

The government’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), based in Victoria, London, was officially opened by the Queen in early February.

The new boss is Ciaran Martin, who has moved from the agency’s headquarters in Cheltenham.

The NCSC is already busy as it says it has stopped more than a hundred high level cyber attacks in the last few months.

“The cyberattacks we are seeing are increasing in their frequency, their severity, and their sophistication,” chancellor Philip Hammond said ahead of the opening.

“We will help secure our critical services, lead the response to the most serious incidents and improve the underlying security of the internet through technological improvement and advice to citizens and organisations,” Martin said. This will include finding vulnerabilities in public sector websites, stopping spoof emails, and taking down thousands of phishing websites in the UK.

The National Cyber Security Centre has four key objectives outlined in its prospectus.

  1. To Be a Centre of Expertise on Cyber Security

To understand the cyber security environment, share knowledge, and use that expertise to identify and address systemic vulnerabilities. The NCSC will be the centre of government expertise on what is happening in cyberspace.. That knowledge will be used to provide best practice advice and guidance, and to tackle systemic vulnerabilities to enhance cyber security for all.

  1. To Protect the UK

To reduce risks to the UK by working with public and private sector organisations to improve their cyber security. The NCSC will support the most critical organisations in the UK across government and the private sector to secure and defend their networks.

  1. To respond to Cyber Security Incidents

When a serious cyber incident occurs, the NCSC will work with victims to minimise the damage, to help with recovery, and to learn lessons to reduce the chance of recurrence and minimise future impact. At the same time the NCSC will ensure that the wider response of government and law enforcement is well co-ordinated

  1. To Grow the UK Cyber Security Capability

To nurture and grow our national cyber security capability, and provide leadership on critical national cyber security issues. Cyber security and information technology continues to develop and evolve at a rapid pace. As the Centre within government for cyber-knowledge, the NCSC will have the best possible visibility of what is happening today – in terms of threats, vulnerabilities and technology trends. This means cutting edge technical research teams, combining the best of government, industry and academic expertise, scanning the horizon and helping plan for what could challenge us tomorrow. The NCSC will lead the UK’s thinking across the range of initiatives and developments, ensuring that the UK Government, organisations and the public can harness the advantages that new technologies bring in a safe and secure manner.

Let’s hope the new NCSC is up to the job of combatting foreign and domestic hackers, criminals and terrorists.

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Caller Protection Company Fined For Cold Calling

A West Sussex company has been fined £40,000 for making nuisance calls to the elderly.

The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) ruled that IT Protect Ltd, in Bognor Regis, broke the law because it called people registered with the Telephone Preference Service (TPS), which is a service home users can sign up to for preventing unsolicited calls.

Ironically, this firm was making nuisance calls to people to sell them a call blocking device. But by phoning people registered with the TPS it broke the law. The ICO  investigation was aided by members of the public reporting the nuisance calls they’d received from IT Protect.. They told ICO that the firm had preyed on the elderly and misled people by giving the impression they were working with BT.”  STEVE ECKERSLEY, HEAD OF ENFORCEMENT, ICO

IT Protect told the ICO it had bought a list of people and phone numbers from another firm, but it had not verified that the numbers were not on the TPS list and hence could not legally be cold called.

Reliance on another firm does not preclude the company from law breaking.

The law says that calls should not be made to anyone who has registered with the TPS unless they have told the caller that they wish to receive such calls from them. Companies failing to screen against the TPS, who then call people without consent, can expect enforcement action by the ICO.

IT Protect is the first company to be slapped with a bill by the ICO since it took over management of the Telephone Preference System in December

TPS  is a free service designed to protect people from unsolicited sales or marketing calls

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Liverpool Advertising Scammers Busted

Advertising magazine fraudster George Williams jailed for seven years over £5.2 million scam.

George Williams controlled a Liverpool-based team conning firms into paying for adverts in a publication called “Emergency Services News”. There should have been about 1.2m copies per year to fulfil their promises to clients but instead police found they only printed 30,000 copies over 3 years.

Williams and others called themselves Weinstein Williams Associates Ltd and were found to have falsely claimed that they worked for the emergency services and detectives believe as many as 15,000 victims paid for adverts in publications that either did not materialise or didn’t reached the audience they had been promised.

Weinstein Williams Associates cold-called people all over the UK, claiming they were endorsed by emergency services to get people to place paid adverts in their fake magazine. Anyone who complained was threatened with legal action.

Williams, of Linacre Road, Bootle, took £2,000 a week and splashed out on flash cars, boats and property. He was jailed for seven years and four other men were sentenced at Liverpool Crown Court over the scam.

Judge Robert Warnock told Williams: “The evidence is overwhelming. You recruited guilty and unscrupulous sales staff. You enjoyed the criminal lifestyle.”  “You have shown no remorse at all. It is highly probable you will offend in the same way. Your motive was greed and your method deception.”

Scammers like this create a plausible situation where they appear to help people in business. But it’s mostly fake and the businesses lose out and the scammers get very rich.

If you have any experiences with scammers, spammers or time-wasters do let me know, by email.

The Traffic Monsoon Ponzi Scheme


Pyramid investment scheme worth £160MILLION shut down after taking money from 162,000 people

Traffic Monsoon, which is run by Charles Scoville, claimed to make people money through online advertising ‘AdPacks’. Mr.  Scoville, an American “entrepreneur” has a history of similar schemes.

The Securities and Exchange Commission stated that “Traffic Monsoon’s advertising business is an illusion designed to obscure the fact that it is offering and selling a pure Ponzi scheme” . “Over 99% of Traffic Monsoon’s revenue comes from the sale of AdPacks”.

“The company has virtually no other revenue from any other source”.

ADPACKS

Everyone who joined bought AdPacks at $50 each (£38) and was required to click on 50 banner adverts each day, staying on each for five seconds. It’s this online traffic that members were told would generate income, but it didn’t.

In April, PayPal notified Scoville that his business had the hallmarks of a Ponzi scheme  and in time froze the company’s funds – approximately $61 million. Scoville continued to sell Adpacks even though he couldn’t pay anyone.

The PayPal freeze ended on July 11, and Scoville transferred $25.6 million out of the PayPal account into a separate Traffic Monsoon account and immediately transferred $21 million of those funds into his own personal account.

He attempted to transfer additional funds out of the PayPal account, but PayPal stopped this.

Scovile continues to maintain his company is genuine and posted he on Facebook – “For those of you who read the report and wonder why I moved funds from the business account to my personal…it truly was to protect those funds”.  Some people still believe in him and a petition has been launched on Change.org to raise money for Scoville.

The company has taken in $207 million dollars in actual cash, but on paper Traffic Monsoon had generated $738 million dollars in revenue.  Clearly that extra revenue does not exist and only by continually increasing the number of new members buying adpacks could the scheme continue to pay out, until its inevitable collapse.

Had the SEC of not stepped in, Scoville and the funds may have disappeared.

If you have any experiences with scammers, spammers or time-waster do let me know, by email.

Nuisance Caller Prosecuted

Louis Kidd, 27, lives at home with his mother in Brighton but was the owner of Prodial – a company responsible for 46 million nuisance phone calls in the UK about PPI (Payment Protection Insurance).

Prodial’s computer systems would dial numbers and play a recorded message about claiming PPI. Anyone who responded would have their details sold on to Claims Management companies.

The automated calls, dialled from a computer server in the south east of England, hit homes across Britain at the rate of over 330,000 a day, at all times of the day and night between January 20 and August 21, 2015.

Complainants said they were called repeatedly and often there was no way to opt out even for people who had never had PPI.

The Information Commissioners Office estimated that Prodial was making as much as £100,000 per month and described the operation as ‘one of the worst cases’ they had ever come across.

The regulator has ordered Prodial to pay a £350,000 fine but the company was wound up before the prosecution and has no assets left. Liquidators are trying to determine where the money has disappeared to.

Previous Companies

Mr Kidd and Mr Carrington (his business partner)  both worked previously at Italk Affiliate Telecommunications, which is itself under investigation by the ICO for making between four million and six million calls a day using similar,  technology to Prodial.

Italk was raided by the ICO in March last year and faces a possible maximum fine of £500,000. By then, Mr Kidd and Mr Carrington had jumped ship.

There appears to be a group of people who know how to abuse the system and some have got away with it for a long time as this has happened with other companies as well.

The Result

Prodial has been fined and is out of business, but the people responsible are free to open more companies and able do the same thing again.

“There is a group of people who know how to abuse the system and some have got away with it for longer than others,” said a source familiar with the investigation.

If you have any experiences with scammers, spammers or time-waster do let me know, by email.