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By Sachin Ravikumar
LONDON (Reuters) - British authorities have shut down an online platform which allowed criminals to make fraudulent phone calls to steal money from hundreds of thousands of people globally, the National Crime Agency (NCA) said.
The platform, named 'Russian Coms' but with no known link to the Russian state, was a crime-as-a-service operation that allowed criminals to impersonate legitimate callers such as banks or credit card firms in order to defraud victims over the phone, NCA officials said at a media briefing.
The platform had facilitated 1.3 million calls to UK phone numbers between 2021 and 2024 and caused financial losses in the tens of millions of pounds, with an estimated 170,000 victims in the UK alone. Officials did not provide estimates for the number of global victims.
Authorities arrested three individuals from Newham, east London, in March and April, and released them on conditional bail. Two of them are thought to have helped create and develop Russian Coms, NCA officials said.
A typical scam would involve calling someone as a representative from their bank and advising them to transfer money to a different account because of fraudulent activity being detected.
Fraud now makes up 40% of all crime against individuals in England and Wales with more than 80% of it being enabled by technology.
"Criminals are increasingly using technology to carry out fraud and other crimes on an industrial scale, causing very real harm to victims in the UK and across the world," Adrian Searle, the director of the NCA's National Economic Crime Centre, said in a statement.
British authorities have in recent years busted similar platforms including iSpoof and LabHost, underscoring the often whack-a-mole nature of catching cybercriminals.
Russian Coms was sold as a handset or a web application and took payment via cryptocurrency. A screenshot shared by the NCA advertised a monthly service for 350 pounds ($446) that offered features such as 5,000 minutes of encrypted calling from anywhere and 24/7 customer support.
Additional features advertised included "hold music" and voice-changing services.
($1 = 0.7843 pounds)
(Reporting by Sachin Ravikumar; editing by William James)
