Tejay Fletcher appeared at Southwark Crown Court on Thursday
By Claire Ellison
BBC News
A multi-million pound fraudster has pleaded guilty to a sophisticated banking scam called iSpoof which stole £100m from victims worldwide.
At Southwark Crown Court, Tejay Fletcher admitted multiple charges.
Last year the Metropolitan Police texted 70,000 people to warn them their details had been compromised and they had likely been defrauded.
The fraudsters called people at random, pretending to be a bank warning of suspicious activity on their accounts.
They would pose as employees of banks including Barclays, Santander, HSBC, Lloyds, Halifax, First Direct, NatWest, Nationwide and TSB.
The fraudsters would encourage people to disclose security information and, through technology, may have accessed features such as one-time passcodes to clear accounts of funds.
This is the largest fraud investigation the Metropolitan Police have ever carried out. In the UK alone £43m was lost. One victim lost £3m.
Fletcher, 35, of Western Gateway in east London, pleaded guilty to running the iSpoof website which allowed criminals and fraudsters to pretend to be banks and tax offices.
He admitted charges of making or supplying articles for use in fraud, encouraging or assisting the commission of an offence, possessing criminal property and transferring criminal property.
“He was the ringleader of a slick fraud website which enabled criminals to defraud innocent people of millions of pounds,” said Det Supt Helen Rance, who led the investigation.
“We are doing more than ever before to protect Londoners from spoofing and cyber fraud and devised a bespoke plan to reach out to victims who were targeted via iSpoof.”
Last year, when the fraud emerged, Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley said the Met was contacting mobile numbers connected to the fraudsters for longer than a minute, suggesting a fraud or attempted fraud had taken place.
Criminals paid Fletcher for access to his iSpoof website, transferring up to £5,000 a month in Bitcoin. The Federal Bureau of Investigation in the US took the site down last year.
Fletcher will be sentenced on 18 May at Southwark Crown Court.
