The fraud scammers putting people out of pocket by cloning phone numbers

ITV News Reporter Kaf Okpattah spoke to those scammed by iSpoof - software which cloned the phone numbers of banks and other legitimate businesses.

On May 19 2023, Tejay Fletcher, the head of a fraud service platform known as iSpoof, was sentenced to 13 years in prison.

iSpoof provided users with the ability to clone the phone numbers of banks and other legitimate businesses, with the sole purposes of scamming people out of their money.

People like Carina - a lawyer- who’d been tricked into transferring over £7,000 of her own money to scammers who’d called her pretending to be her bank.

As I left Southwark Crown Court after Tejay Fletcher’s sentencing, I was flagged down by a young boy, no older than 15.

He’d been in court because his father was also a victim of iSpoof, having been scammed out of £5,000. The money, the young boy said, was his father's savings.

He told me about another group operating on the social media platform, Telegram, who were providing the same product as iSpoof - their name was Russian Comms.

Unbeknownst to the teenager, ITV News was already six months into a year a half long investigation on Russian Comms.

The void that was left after the demise of iSpoof meant that scammers around the world scrambled desperately to find a new product to facilitate their crimes.

And that’s where Russian Comms came in.

The product itself was a carefully modified Motorola smartphone, and it appeared as such on the surface. It came with the usual pre-loaded apps like a calendar, and weather app.

The only difference between the Russian Comms phone and an ordinary phone was that none of the apps worked.

In fact, the only purpose of this phone was to house the Russian Comms software - an app which could only be accessed by pressing the volume button repeatedly 12 times.

Once access to the app was gained users are able to change their caller ID to anyone and anything: from banks, to energy companies to even the prime minister.

People receiving calls from the Russian Comms phone would see the caller ID appearing as whoever the Russian Comm user wanted it to be.

As months passed, more features were added to the Russian Comms phone:

• Hold music to give the impression of a legitimate business.

• Bot voicemails with the ability to change the accents of of the voice heard in these messages.

Perhaps most frightening was the phone's ability to use deepfake technology to clone people’s voices (e.g. your wife or line manager) as well as their phone numbers. Fortunately, that update never came to fruition.

It just so happened that over the course of our investigation the Russian Comm’s operation had also caught the eye of the National Crime Agency.

After a year's worth of evidence gathering and surveillance - the suspected criminal mastermind behind Russian Comms was arrested in a terraced house in Barking, East London.

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The suspect was a mere 26 years old, yet believed to have facilitated fraud on a global scale.

Coincidently after his arrest, all layers of the Russian Comms operation went to ground.

There were no more adverts selling the phones and the Telegram group chat which kept users informed about updates became inactive.

While another fraud operation has now been shut down, the sad reality is that this type of crime is a game of whack-a-mole.

And while Russian Comms, and iSpoof before it, may be no more, it is only a matter of time before another fraud service gang pops up.

There are, however, measures being taken to limit the impact of these services. The government's new anti-fraud task force will see law enforcement groups like the National Crime Agency and Met Police take a more proactive approach to combating scammers.

They plan to seek them out before a crime is reported in the hope that the damage they inflict on the public never reaches its full potential.

What should you do if you think you've fallen for a scam?

The Met Police recommend victims of scams report any incidents to Action Fraud.

When filling out the report, they advise including the telephone number you received the spoofed call on.

They also recommend you change your passwords, and contact your bank if any money has been transferred.

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