'How the 35-year-old Weed Smoker Behind 10 Million Scam Calls Made His Fortune' (yahoo.com) 58
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.
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.
You gotta understand (Score:2)
He needs the cash - that weed doesn't pay for itself!
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But like many criminals I think he was addicted to the crime. Anyone who's made that much money isn't doing it for the money any more. Quit and disappear and maybe find some more productive use of your time.
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Well growing in London might be a bit of a pain.
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Open space. Space is a premium in London.
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It's not terribly easy to grow either. Throw some seeds in the dirt and they might sprout, but the product won't be worth smoking.
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Yeah, weed doesn't grow on trees.
Weed (Score:3, Insightful)
What does weed have to do with this? Why not say 35 yr old water drinker or food eater?
Catch one and 2 more pop-up (Score:4, Informative)
https://www.spoofcard.com/ [spoofcard.com]
https://www.spoofbox.com/ [spoofbox.com]
Re:Catch one and 2 more pop-up (Score:4)
I hate this. It makes caller ID useless, and all the scammers/spammers use it. My rule of thumb is that if a call is coming from my own area code and prefix then its spam.
Right now my mothers land line is nearly useless. It probably gets 10 calls an hour in the morning, sometimes they're back to back; this feels someone recent in the last couple of months. She feels compelled to look at each one; good thing there is some caller ID now at least, she used to answer them all, and then she gets suckered into buying stuff or listening to a scam (never learned once how to distrust people). But she still feels compelled to look at the number rather than waiting for someone to leave a message. I'd have her remove it but she is not good at using the mobile phone.
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If that VM is too pricey, try this instead [nerdvittles.com], (but lose the single VM snapshot the more expensive service offers). This same cloudhost has many other great deals [racknerd.com]!
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All you need is PRI or SIP provider and an Asterisk server.
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A-B (Score:2)
How the reader feels about weed, weed smoking and the "type" of person they envision matters a great deal as to how interesting this story is.
Kind of how like in American where titty (and A and more and other) venues are available, Hooters aren't (because why bother with the nod, nudge and wink.) And legal weed too.
This will be a fun thread to see where folks stand on "weed." This guy seems quite motivated in any case.
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Yeah, I kind of skipped over that; but the headline is very 1980s.
Re:A-B (Score:5, Insightful)
I was a bit baffled as to why it was felt necessary to include the fact that they smoke weed. What on earth does that have to do with the story? One doesn't see "Alcohol drinker committed crime" very often after all.
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https://lawandcrime.com/crime/... [lawandcrime.com]
https://www.sportscasting.com/... [sportscasting.com]
https://www.theguardian.com/us... [theguardian.com]
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So a bunch of articles about crimes that alcohol abuse actually had something to do with what was happening? I think you focused too much on my last sentence and not enough on its context in my overall post.
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Well my point was that weed is irrelevant to the story but you're kidding yourself if you think alcohol consumers have been stigmatized as much as weed consumers any time in recent history. I mean, there are still plenty of people out there that will insist to the day that they die that weed is a "gateway drug" so somehow has magical properties that mind control people into doing hard drugs.
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Why would we be talking about alcoholics here? The article only mentioned this person consumes weed and doesn't bring up frequency.
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How the reader feels about weed, weed smoking and the "type" of person they envision matters a great deal as to how interesting this story is.
Some people do go around absolutely reeking of pot, and IMHO that's more obnoxious than scam calls, since I can set my phone to block unknown callers. There's no such setting on my schnoz to block the smell of someone who really should've hit the shower and changed their clothes before heading out to stink up the aisles at the local supermarket.
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Uh, my reasoning? Spam calls affect everyone's behavior (not just you) - because of spam calls, most people filter their calls, rather than simply answering their phone. That has a lot of small ripples through society. Plus, some people actually get scammed. That thing about people smelling like weed in public? I live in Seattle, WA where weed has been legal for several yea
His mistake: Not stashing the records (Score:2)
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Until recently, law enforcement in the UK was well segregated from politics. So there was nobody in the process whose chances at re-election to a paid position depended on populist manipulation of the crime stats. This meant that there was no incentive to load extra charges onto a case to be able to say "That's going to be 107 years in prison, but if you forgo the trial we'll make it 3 years".
Plea-bargaining is evil. Everyone should have the right to trial by their peers, without coercive loading of charges
That's an extremely charitable (Score:2)
"Made his fortune"?
Um. More like "engaged in some criminal activity, temporarily made a bunch of $$$ and then promptly lost it all and also his freedom and automomy, just like most criminals"
FTFY
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Yeah and that. I think my issue with the headline and story are that the the weed part is presented as being worse (through headlining it and pairing it with "made fortune") or the scandalous part more so than the criminal deception. Ick. Worst kind of clickbait. I think these writers have seen too many movies.
woah there! a weed smoker! (Score:5, Funny)
i wonder ... was he also a cheese eater? or maybe even a orange juice drinker? one never knows with these people ...
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There's a good chance he ate Cheetos often, which is a cheese-flavored food product.
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There's a good chance he ate Cheetos often, which is a cheese-flavored food product.
I bet he ate spam and eggs quite often.
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I propose we change the terminology from World Hunger to World Munchies, after we distribute all the weed anyone will ever need. Certain people may be less offended by that.....but I doubt it.
Re:woah there! a weed smoker! (Score:5, Interesting)
i wonder ... was he also a cheese eater? or maybe even a orange juice drinker? one never knows with these people ...
Personally, when I saw the description of the "35 year old man" running the scam website I stereotyped a middle-class white guy (ie, go to the tech entrepreneur stereotype).
When I saw it was a black guy who grew up in foster care I was mildly surprised.
I suspect the headline writer had some of the same reaction, and included the descriptor "weed smoker" to signal to readers that they should be thinking less "tech entrepreneur gone awry" and more "small time criminal who made it big".
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He wasn't even a techie, from the summary as he hired freelancers to make his site.
Interesting that he had this idea when he probably did not know if this was technically possible in the first place.
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He wasn't even a techie, from the summary as he hired freelancers to make his site.
Interesting that he had this idea when he probably did not know if this was technically possible in the first place.
Hiring others to do all the coding? Kinda reminds me of someone else [slashdot.org].
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Except SBF was working in finance / investment / trading prior to starting FTX so he already knew trading/investment platforms existed. It's just a matter of getting a bunch of developers to work on creating his own platform.
Am not an expert in rockets, and if you are not either, would you think either of us would think up of some idea about building rockets which we never really heard of before. The idea may actually be already used in the industry without us being aware of it, but without good knowledge o
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Next time use XMR (Score:2)
Stupid stoners.
Free beer for life (Score:2)
Sometimes a fella will do something great, and people say he's gonna get free beer for life at any pub he walks in to.
Now we know who's buying it for him.
Shelf life (Score:1)
That is some really old weed to smoke. What is the shelf life on that stuff anyhow?
Title says it all... (Score:2)
Dubbing him the "Weed Smoker"?! (Score:2)
Is this some cheap attempt at making look more like a lowdown criminal?
If he was using the proceeds to buy expensive wines, cars, or other luxury items they wouldn't title him in this way.
Good luck in prison (Score:1)
Some 120 suspected phone scammers have been arrested, 103 of them in London.
Good luck in prison, Fletcher.
Re: Good luck in prison (Score:2)
Yeah. Would be funny to put him in the same prison as the rest. But since we're civilised it's unlikely to happen.
Weed smoker? (Score:1)
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some countries are still caught in "Reefer Madness" syndrome.
Execute them (Score:1)
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I was thinking England could bring back the Gibet for him.
Just don't place it near where people live.
I wish I had a dime for every time I was called. Seems like I'm always being called and nobody is even on the other end. At least not for a while.
From a place where Weed is legal... (Score:1)
...it's funny seeing how IMPORTANT someone smoking weed is to media in other places.
"weedsmoker" = clickbait (Score:2)
The weed smoking had nothing to do with his criminal enterprise. It's the equivelant of saying "How this husband overthrew Isaac Newton" when talking about Albert Einstein.
Do not read articles written by people that think you are an idiot, as this guy did.
capital punishment may be a hair too extreme... (Score:1)