Phone shops allegedly enabling scammers

Policing chiefs and law enforcement agencies are calling for tougher laws to protect the public and they have accused major mobile phone companies of fuelling a rise in scam text messages

HM Chief Inspector of Constabulary, Sir Tom Winsor, urged the Government to help solve a "serious problem for the police and for society" by considering a ban on shops selling phones and SIM cards without asking buyers for proof of identity.

He further commented, "Criminal use of unregistered mobile phones is a serious problem for the police and for society. The arrangements that allow people to anonymously purchase phones and numbers should be re-examined," Sir Tom said. He added that the Home Office should "commission a review of the criminal abuse of mobile telecommunications service" as soon as possible.

A senior official at the National Crime Agency signalled that the agency would also support a change in the law.

In the past year fraudsters have seized on the Covid pandemic and sent millions of messages designed to lure people into giving up funds - in some cases their life savings. Cases almost doubled from 20,109 in 2019 to 39,364 last year with losses up from £134 million to £150.3 million. Many of the texts claim to be from trusted organisations such as banks, the NHS, or Royal Mail.

Criminals often use prepaid SIM cards bought from phone shops or internet auction sites such as eBay as cheaply as £10 each to send the messages. Each SIM can be used to register a brand-new mobile number on a phone network. The scammers often plug the cards into a Chinese-made "SIM farm" - a piece of equipment freely sold on the internet for as little as £60 - and use it to anonymously send thousands of messages every hour to mobile numbers that they have bought or stolen online.

Most of the messages will be ignored or deleted, but the criminals only need a few successful strikes to make vast profits.

Police and law enforcement are struggling to contain the rising tide of fraudulent texts, and are calling on the Government to intervene. They say mobile providers should be forced by law to "know their customers" rather than allowing bulk purchasing of pay-as-you-go SIMs with unlimited texts without any checks or identification. They suggest there should be a law that means anyone buying a SIM card has to provide their identification.

Jon Shilland, the fraud threat lead at the National Economic Crime Centre said: "The bar to entry for these criminals is remarkably low, and that's not helped by readily available unaccountable SIM cards. We would like to see improved know-your-customer checks within the telephony and internet industries to make it harder for criminals to abuse these services. If that ends up requiring a change in the law to deliver, then it would be logical for us to support that."

Although phone shops are not legally required to ask for ID, some providers have already committed to a limit on the number of new SIM cards that can be bought by any one customer. A spokesman for EE insisted the company's policy is to only allow a maximum of two SIM cards to be purchased in any one instance, either in person or online.