Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, whether his Department is taking steps to support (a) businesses and (b) other organisations whose numbers are used by (i) nuisance callers and (ii) criminals in number spoofing scams.

A central pillar of the Government’s Fraud Strategy is blocking individuals and groups from attempting to impersonate other organisations and institutional bodies. As part of this work, the Government has introduced a new measure to the Criminal Justice Bill to strengthen law enforcement capabilities to tackle scam text messages. The Bill will create a new offence for supplying or possessing “SIM farm” devices (which allow criminals to send scam texts to thousands of individuals and businesses at the same time), without good reason or undertaking adequate due diligence.

In addition, the Government and Industry have signed the Telecommunications Fraud Sector Charter, a voluntary agreement to improve counter-fraud efforts. As a result of the Charter, the sector has introduced firewalls that detect and stop scam texts from reaching customers. Since January 2022, the firewalls have stopped 960 million scam text messages.

Law enforcement are also working tirelessly to tackle criminal number spoofing operations at source. Last year, Operation Elaborate led by the Metropolitan police took down iSpoof, a website that was used to make 10 million spoof calls impersonating individuals and businesses. The international joint action led to 142 arrests and the main administrator of the website was sentenced to 13 years and 4 months of imprisonment.

In April this year, in another successful joint operation codenamed Stargrew, the Met took down LabHost; a major criminal website, which fraudsters used to create over 40,000 fake phishing websites impersonating businesses. So far the operation has led to 37 arrests, and over 25,000 victims in the UK have been contacted.