The U.K. National Crime Agency (NCA) arrested the two suspects in Newham, London, in March and dismantled the platform. Officials said the takedown and acquisition of the service’s backend provided them with “significant amounts of data.”
According to the NCA, the “Russian Coms” platform, which began operating in 2021, has no provable link to the Russian Federation, but it has caused significant financial damage, with over 170,000 victims in Britain alone and tens of millions of dollars in losses.
Fraudsters using the service, which operated through a converted Motorola smartphone and web application, are believed to have made calls to 107 countries, including the United States, New Zealand, Norway, France, and the Bahamas.
The NCA tracked more than 1.3 million calls made through the platform to 500,000 unique phone numbers. Approximately 170,000 of these calls lasted over five minutes, suggesting a high success rate for the fraudsters.
“A typical scam involved offenders spoofing the number of a bank to gain the trust of a victim, before convincing them that their account had been subject to fraudulent activity. They would then be persuaded to transfer their money to another account in order to safeguard their savings,” the NCA said in a statement.
Fraud now constitutes 40% of all individual crime in England and Wales, with over 80% of these crimes being enabled by technology.
“Criminals are increasingly using technology to carry out fraud and other crimes on an industrial scale, causing harm to victims in the UK and across the world,” NCA Director Adrian Searle said.
British authorities have previously taken down similar platforms, such as iSpoof and LabHost, highlighting the ongoing challenge of combating cybercrime.