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THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE have been trafficked amid threats of murder by organised criminals to work in call centres targeting people with sophisticated scams, senior investigators in Interpol have said.
These include romance scams, complex tailored emails to take millions of euro direct from companies, and the familiar scam calls from +44 numbers that many of us have become all-too-familiar with in recent months.
Inside Interpol’s headquarters in Lyon, France and at a base in Singapore, investigators are monitoring the workings of this cyber-criminal world. Last week, The Journal travelled to Lyon to meet the expert teams who lead the fight back – both in cyber and financial crime investigations.
In Ireland the Garda’s National Economic Crime Bureau and the National Cyber Crime Bureau are tasked with domestic investigations – backed up by the National Cyber Security Centre.
Interpol acts as an international liaison and information dissemination service, linking up with police forces in Ireland and other countries.
The investigators told The Journal that the crimes are being committed from multiple locations.
Nicholas Court, a City of London police detective who is the Director of the INTERPOL Financial Crime and Anti-Corruption Centre, revealed that they have found evidence that many of those working scam call centres are themselves victims of the criminal organised crime groups leading the operations.
“The last few years, especially in Southeast Asian countries, there’s been the development of huge compounds on buildings, sometimes entire estates, created by criminals solely for the purpose of committing fraud.
“Those compounds often house hundreds of people and on many occasions, but not all occasions, the people that work in those have been trafficked in order to to work.
“They are held against their will and are subject to horrendous conditions and horrendous abuses and even murder,” he said.
Court said that there have been recent convictions of people in those compounds for serious crimes which have even involved “the execution of their own gang members”.
US Secret Service officer Neal Jetton, who is Interpol’s Director of Cyber Crime, said that away from the call centres, the “industrialisation of cyber crime” means that these scams could just as easily be staged from an Irish suburb as an office block in a Southeast Asian city.
Predictably Jetton said that criminals have supercharged their efforts by using AI to craft their scams. He said it has been a “game changer” for cyber-crime.
The technology is being used to craft so-called phishing emails or text messages and the AI is able to write these prompts in the cultural language of the country. In other words they send an email drafted to appear as though a victim is hearing from an Irish person.
These can include scams like the infamous “I lost my phone Mam” texts, which could ultimately lead an unsuspecting victim giving out passwords and other confidential data allowing the scammer to steal money.
“The clickability rate on an email is improved by 4.5 times if it’s created by AI versus not created by AI,” Jetton added.
Interpol has introduced a new alert to combat the issue. They now issue a Silver Notice member countries can request information on assets linked to a person’s criminal activities such as fraud, corruption, drug trafficking, environmental crime and other serious offences.
Since the launch of the measure in 2024 it has already secured success with an alert succeeding in gathering evidence for a fraud committed in Brazil which took millions of euro from an Italian company.
It is clear, talking to investigators in Interpol, that the scale and sophistication of the crimes is vast. Court said that he is particularly moved by the victims of sextortion and romance fraud.
He said that the threatened forced sharing of intimate images by young people in sextortion scams has led to many of the victims dying by suicide. In these cases, the criminal seeks payment not to release the images.
Romance fraud victims are tricked into handing over money to scammers who they believe are romantic connections online. He said this particular crime had also led to suicides as people lose the trust of their families and suffer isolation after falling victim to such scams.
“I have met these victims. I do know these people. I know how the criminals work and I know the impact they have on the people that I’ve tried to help in the past.”
On the task of tackling the criminal gangs and attempting to keep ahead of developments in the technology they use he said: It’s definitely not impossible, but it’s difficult”
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