A student who operated a text message scam claiming to be from organisations like the Royal Mail and HMRC has been jailed.

Abdisalaam Dahir, a computer science student, tried to trick people into handing over their bank details by imitating alerts from banks and mobile phone providers.

The 20-year-old, who is from Enfield in North London, made £185,000 from the campaign.

The messages included a link to a fake webpage designed to look like company websites to dupe people into submitting personal details.

According to police, he ran the scheme between December 1, 2019 and May 20, 2021, but was undone by a major police investigation against himself and other similar criminals.

Officers seized and examined Dahir’s computers and found they contained personal details from hundreds of victims, as well as £10,000 in cash at his home address.

He was sentenced to 22 months in prison at London Crown Court on August 20 after pleading  guilty to committing fraud by false representation, being in possession of articles for use in fraud and money laundering offences.

Alexander White of the CPS said: ‘At a time when the country was looking to COVID-19 grants to help the desperate in our society financially survive this pandemic, Dahir was seeking to exploit this by prising vital personal financial information from vulnerable victims.’

The sting was orchestrated by the Dedicated Card and Payment Crime Unit (DCPCU), a joint City of London and Metropolitan Police unit funded by the banking and cards industry and dedicated to cracking down on the scourge of online and mobile fraud.

The amount of money being lost to scam artists shot up during the pandemic, according to an analysis of Action Fraud data by the consumer group Which? 

Between April 2020 and March 2021 there were 413,553 fraud reports, up by 33% on the previous year, with losses totalling £2.3bn.

The group said the online shopping fraud – where payment isn’t received for sold products or products don’t arrive after payment is taken – grew by almost two thirds as more people made purchases online during lockdown.

While shopping fraud accounted for the most lost money, phone fraud saw the biggest year-on-year increase (83%), with scam artists adapting to the shift to online shopping and sending texts purporting to be from couriers.

Commenting on Dahir’s case, detective constable Stephen Reilly at the DCPCU, said: ‘Dahir tried to scam the public by sending out fake texts claiming to be from genuine organisations for his own personal gain.

‘Through close collaboration with the mobile phone company and the banking industry, we were able to identify Dahir and bring him to justice.’

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