Tejay Fletcher, the brains of the infamous scam website iSpoof, was given a sentence of 13 years and 4 months in jail after being found guilty of his crimes. The verdict was handed down to the 35-year-old defendant, who lives in the Western Gateway neighborhood of London, on May 18th, at Southwark Crown Court. Fletcher had already entered a guilty plea for a variety of charges, including making or delivering fake materials, aiding and abetting criminal offenses, holding illegal assets, and transferring illicit monies.
The operation, which was carried out in conjunction with the Cyber and Economic Crime Units of the Metropolitan Police, the City of London Police, the National Crime Agency, Europol, Eurojust, Dutch authorities, and the FBI, was successful in dismantling iSpoof in November 2022, successfully apprehending users of the website, and ensuring that the operator of the website was brought to justice.
Scotland Yard has taken down the iSpoof website and has arrested over one hundred people in the United Kingdom. Website belonging to iSpoof that was seized. Through the use of the iSpoof platform, criminals were able to mimic officials from banks, tax offices, and other legitimate organizations in order to steal millions of pounds from victims who were unaware of the scam. It is believed that victims in the United Kingdom alone sustained damages amounting to a total of £43 million, while losses on a worldwide scale exceeded £100 million.
At the height of its illegal operations, iSpoof made it possible for con artists to defraud their targets by impersonating almost twenty different people every minute. They did this by contacting nearly twenty different people. The dismantling of the network, on the other hand, has offered some solace to the victims while simultaneously dealing a severe blow to the realm of cyber-enabled fraud. The Deputy Director of the National Crime Agency and Head of the National Cyber Crime Unit, Paul Foster, stressed the significance of focusing on online platforms that assist criminal activity as a primary area of investigation. Foster has claimed that his organization would “continue to target criminal infrastructure and pursue the administrators and users.” It is of the utmost importance that victims and their personal information be protected online. Users would make payments to iSpoof in order to mimic bank employees from well-known financial institutions including Barclays, Santander, HSBC, Lloyds, and Halifax. This was the standard operating procedure for iSpoof.
Fraudsters were able to steal money from the accounts of unsuspecting persons by impersonating concerned authorities and pressuring them into giving sensitive information, such as one-time passcodes. This gave the fraudsters the ability to steal money from the victims’ accounts. The reported damages sustained by victims of iSpoof in the UK alone total to £48 million, with an estimated loss of £10,000 per victim on average. On the other hand, it is thought that the true numbers are substantially greater given that they were underreported. iSpoof was responsible for facilitating about 10 million fraudulent calls all around the world in the twelve months leading up to August 2022, with 3.5 million of those calls coming from the United Kingdom.
Out of these calls, there were 350,000 that went on for more than one minute, impacting a total of 200,000 people. An additional 340 victims have come forward to assist the investigation as a direct consequence of public pleas, which demonstrates the pervasive nature of the damage caused by iSpoof’s activities. iSpoof had explosive expansion in the years leading up to its closure in November 2022, with 700 new members signing up for the website every single week. It amassed 59,000 registered users while generating an average weekly revenue of £80,000. In addition to this, Fletcher promoted iSpoof by way of a channel known as The iSpoof Club by using the encrypted chat platform Telegram. He kept users up to date, promoted website upgrades, and expanded the network all via the usage of this channel.
Information security specialist, currently working as risk infrastructure specialist & investigator.
15 years of experience in risk and control process, security audit support, business continuity design and support, workgroup management and information security standards.