The website was used to defraud victims on an industrial scale.
The site’s frauds managed to deceive up to 70,000 people in the UK, and they managed to collect 480,000 card numbers and 64,000 PINs worldwide.
A criminal network created the scammer website LabHost in 2021, allowing users to create phishing websites that fool victims into disclosing personal information such bank account data, passwords, and email addresses.
Phishing is a type of scam in which perpetrators pose as trustworthy individuals in order to trick victims into disclosing personal information.
Criminal subscribers had the ability to sign in and select from pre-existing websites or create custom pages that looked like reliable companies including postal services, banks, and healthcare providers.
Even those with no experience in IT can utilise LabHost’s service because of the templates and simple tutorials it offers.
The video concluded with a synthetic voice telling scammers to “stay safe and good spamming.”
The website has been paid slightly under £1 million by criminal users since it was founded.
Eight hundred users got a message shortly after the site was taken over and disrupted, informing them that authorities “know who they are and what they’ve been doing”.
By instilling the same degree of dread regarding their information as their victims, police seek to deter former LabHost subscribers from committing new crimes.
Victims contacted
As part of Operation Stargrew, detectives have contacted up to 25,000 victims in the UK to tell them their data has been compromised.
Work began in June 2022 after detectives received crucial intelligence about LabHost’s activity from the Cyber Defence Alliance – a group of British-based banks and law enforcement agencies which work together to share intelligence.
In November 2022, the Met arrested more than 130 suspects as part of Operation Elaborate. An estimated 200,000 victims were targeted by a scam stealing millions from the public via fake bank phone calls.
Dame Lynne Owens, deputy commissioner of the Metropolitan Police Service, said: “You are more likely to be a victim of fraud than any other crime.
Apart from the monetary consequences, it erodes the public’s trust in the instruments and technologies they depend on for their everyday existence. We should all work together to guarantee that suspects in their own criminal context have the same degree of mistrust.
Cybercriminals believe they may operate without consequence. They have complete faith that these websites are unhackable by law enforcement and feel they can conceal themselves behind digital personas and platforms like LabHost.
However, as demonstrated by this operation and others conducted in the past year, law enforcement agencies across the globe can and will collaborate with one another and private sector partners to take down global fraud networks at their foundation.
“Our approach is to be more precise and targeted with a clear focus on those enabling online fraud to be carried out on an international scale.”
“Fraud is a terrible crime that impacts victims both financially and psychologically, undermining our collective trust in others and the online services on which we all rely,” stated Adrian Searle, director of the National Economic Crime Centre in the NCA.
It accounts for about half of all crimes in England and Wales, together with cybercrime. Law enforcement is collaborating more closely both domestically and internationally to target fraudsters and the technologies they are using, realising the scope and nature of the problem.
“This operation again demonstrates that UK law enforcement has the capability and intent to identify, disrupt and completely compromise criminal services that are targeting the UK on an industrial scale.”
