14 DAY TRIAL // A British fraudster remanded in custody used his social engineering skills to persuade police officers to release him by relying on textbook phishing.
Now convicted for committing fraud worth £1,819,000 (€2.48 / $2.7 million), Neil Moore registered a domain that looked similar to that of Southwark Crown Court, by replacing some of the original characters with others that would resemble them at a first glance.
Fake email address went unobserved by prison staff
Then he set up an email account with the fake domain using an illegal smartphone obtained in jail, and delivered a message to the prison staff’s inbox containing bail instructions.
28-year-old Moore pulled off the scam by pretending to be a senior court clerk, according to a report from the BBC.
Apparently, nobody from the prison noticed that the message came from a different email address than the official one, so they complied with the request and set the fraudster loose.
“A lot of criminal ingenuity harbours in the mind of Mr Moore. The case is one of extraordinary criminal inventiveness, deviousness and creativity, all apparently the developed expertise of this defendant,” prosecutor Ian Paton said.
The fraudster’s ploy remained undiscovered for three days, when solicitors came for interview and could not find him anywhere. Moore surrendered on his own, after another three days.
Voice impersonation helped with carrying out the scams
His criminal activity consisted in making people from different businesses believe they were talking to employees from banks such as Barclays, Lloyds and Santander, and tricking them into giving him large sums of money.
Apart from talking the talk, it appears that Moore could also impersonate a woman’s voice, which came in handy during the phone scam, as he would answer the call from a victim as a man and then pretend to make a transfer to a female colleague.
This led the police to arrest his partner, believing she was also involved in the deceit. However, charges against her have been dropped.
Moore faces eight counts of fraud and one of escape, and he has pleaded guilty to all of them. He is now awaiting his sentence, scheduled for April 20.