Police shut down the online spoofing service “iSpoof” and arrested 146 people, including the mastermind, following an international law enforcement investigation.
More than 100 arrests have been made, including the head of the platform. Most of these arrests were made by London's Metropolitan Police.
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iSpoof offered cybercriminals so-called "spoofing servers" that allowed them to "spoof" their phone numbers with one belonging to a trusted organization (e.g., a bank).
Call number spoofing allowed criminals to commit social engineering, phishing, and “bank helpdesk” scams.
The Metropolitan Police recently announced that, over the course of a year, iSpoof was used to make 10 million fraudulent calls around the world.
According to Europol, iSpoof has caused losses of approximately $120 million over the past 16 months. The service are estimated to have made profits of $3.85 million during that time.
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The Dutch police's cybercrime unit discovered the servers hosting iSpoof while investigating a fraud case at a bank's helpdesk in Almere, near Amsterdam.
This led to a new investigation focused on the service, which led to the discovery of the iSpoof operator's location in London. They then informed Scotland Yard, which launched its own thorough investigation into the suspect.
Dutch police then “hacked” the servers in Almere and gathered information about how the service operated and who was using it.
UK police launched an undercover operation to track down iSpoof in June 2021, which helped map the criminal network.
Europol became involved in August 2021 to help UK police collect evidence and information from its partners around the world.
On Sunday, November 6, 2022, police in East London arrested the owner of iSpoof. In addition to the arrest, known iSpoof websites such as “ispoof.cc” and “ispoof.me” were seized by authorities.
The two server administrators, aged 19 and 22, were both arrested in Almere. Dutch police said they had collected enough evidence from the seized servers to de-anonymise even more users of the services.
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After iSpoof was taken down, dark web forums that used the service advised their users to “throw everything away.”.
Information source: bleepingcomputer.com
