Fears over scam calls and phony emails as cyber crime epidemic sweeps across Britain

A cyber crime epidemic is blighting Britain with millions of scam texts, emails and phone calls being targeted at potential victims every day. Crime editor JON AUSTIN reports.

- JON AUSTIN

TECH giant BT is blocking a staggering 32 million fake emails from arriving in people’s accounts every day as the cyber fraud scourge spreads.

The company revealed it intercepts about one billion scam messages a month but cannot stop them all getting through.

Bosses told MPs it also prevents an average of a million hoax phone calls each day and has stopped 285 million dodgy text messages being received since July 2021.

The figures highlight the scale of the problem, with fraud and cyber cases making up about half of all crimes reported.

Now the Bar Council is calling on the Government to reopen Nightingale courts, set up during the pandemic, and use them specifically to hear fraud cases.

An estimated 70 to 80 per cent of cyber scams, involving an increased use of AI, come from abroad.

The figures emerged in the same week a Met Police-led global operation shut down a service used by more than 2,000 criminals to defraud victims through 40,000 websites.

Although it is widely believed the elderly are more vulnerable to cyber crime, out of the 70,000 victims from the UK, many were in their in their 20s and 30s.

LabHost was a dark web service set up in 2021 by a criminal cyber network which enabled the creation of “phishing” websites designed to trick victims into revealing personal information such as email addresses, passwords and bank details.

Criminal users were able to use existing sites or request bespoke pages replicating those of trusted brands.

Globally, the service obtained 480,000 card numbers, 64,000 PINs, as well as more than one million passwords.

Last week, 37 suspects were arrested across the UK and by international law enforcement agencies.