'How the 35-year-old Weed Smoker Behind 10 Million Scam Calls Made His Fortune'...

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Long-time Slashdot reader SpzToid shared this story from the Telegraph:

Millions of people get phone calls from scammers and wonder who is at the other end. Now we know: rather than someone in a call centre far away, a "bright young man" living in a lush flat in London has been unmasked as the mastermind behind so many of these calls.

Tejay Fletcher's trial exposed how criminals with a simple website bypassed police, phone operators and banks to facilitate "fraud on an industrial scale", scamming victims out of £100m ($124 million) of their hard earned cash. Fletcher, 35, who ran the website iSpoof.cc, was jailed for 13 years and four months earlier this week following his arrest in 2019 in what is the biggest anti-fraud operation mounted in the UK.

The website allowed criminals to disguise their phone numbers in a process known as "spoofing" and trick unsuspecting people to believe they were being called by their bank or other institutions... The number of people using iSpoof swelled to 69,000 at its peak, with as many as 20 people per minute targeted by callers using the site. More than 10 million fraudulent calls were made using iSpoof in the year to August 2022 — 3.5 million of them in the UK, the prosecution said. More than 200,000 victims in the UK — many of them elderly — lost £43m, while global losses exceeded £100m... The website allowed [its users] to intercept one-time passwords, which were "ironically" introduced by banks to increase their security measures, noted John Ojakovoh, prosecuting...

Fletcher was not particularly tech-savvy, but he used a website called freelancer.com to hire programmers to make the "building blocks" of the site.

iSpooft's users "could only pay via Bitcoin," the Telegraph writes. They describe Bitcoin as "a currency favoured by many criminals because it is more difficult to trace payments."

Here's what happened next:

Posing as iSpoof customers, police paid for a trial subscription in Bitcoin and tested the website. They traced the money they paid to iSpoof and eventually discovered that the "lion's share" of the profits were going to Fletcher. They obtained a copy of the website's server, which revealed call logs that further incriminated Fletcher and the scammers using his website.

It turned out that Fletcher had deceived the scammers, too, when he claimed he was not storing any of their information, prosecutors said... Although Fletcher will remain behind bars, others are also being investigated. Some 120 suspected phone scammers have been arrested, 103 of them in London.

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