Three men who ran a phishing scam worth millions have been sentenced to jail terms totalling 21 years, after a succesful case brought by the Met Police Central e-Crime Unit (PCeU), the Serious Organised Crime Agency (Soca), and the US Secret Service.
The men, Inout Caraman and Adrian Iorgovean from Romania and Nigerian Sunday Godday Etu, were found to have servers containing details of 30,000 bank customers – 12,500 of which were in the UK. They also had 70 million customer email addresses to be used in phishing scams.
Their activities first came to light when intelligence sent to the PCeU revealed that 2,600 phishing pages that mimicked the web pages of banking websites had been set up to gather data from users based in the UK, US, China and Russia.
The men behind the scam were traced to the UK, staying in a luxury hotel in London. They were subsequently caught by officers from Soca and the PCeU and sentenced two days later.
The PCeU then worked with counterparts from the US and France to secure the servers, which were based in the countries. Based on the amount of data stored on the servers, the Financial Fraud Bureau said £59m worth of fraud targeting 12,500 UK victims was prevented, and the figure would have been higher if details of international victims were taken into account.
At sentencing, the Caraman and Iorgovean received sentences of seven years and two months, and five years and seven months respectively for pleading guilty, while Etu received eight years after pleading not guilty.
Investigating officer DI Jason Tunn, of the MPS PCeU, said the convictions were a notable success against the cyber gang and he thanked the support of the United States Secret Service, Municipal Police of Lille, and the Romanian Police Cyber Division for their help in the case.
“These convictions have struck a major and decisive blow against this global cyber crime gang. Quite what they have managed to steal is yet to be determined but their conviction has prevented them from systematically defrauding thousands more bank customers across the world,” he said.
“This is by far the biggest case the PCeU has dealt with to date and is likely to be the biggest cyber phishing case so far in the UK.”
The convictions are the latest success for the PCeU division at the Met, which focuses on cyber crimes, after recent cases such as the arrest of two men for a phishing scam targeting the financial sector.