Two British men, the 19-year-olds Alvin Agyeman Acheampong and Alexander Manfo, have been sentenced for their role in a prolific text messaging scam campaign, broken up by the Police as part of the force's Operation Cargo investigation.
Acheampong received a two-year prison sentence on Tuesday at the Auckland District Court, on multiple charges. These included accessing a computer system for a dishonest purpose, obtaining a document for pecuniary advantage, and possessing goods capable of being used to facilitate crimes.
In April this year, Police said they had seized laptops, phones, SIM cards and electronics used for the scams, which had been taking place since 2022 and ramped up significantly last year.
Manfo, meanwhile, was sentenced to 400 hours' of community service and fined $3400.
Both will be deported from New Zealand, with Manfo leaving the country this week. Acheampong will be deported following the completion of his prison sentence.
Police said after Operation Cargo was launched, the Department of Internal Affairs (DIA) saw an 83% drop in scams reported to the free 7726 short-code SMS number it runs.
Some victims of the numerous messages - the investigation identified that just in five days, the pair had sent out more than 12,000 texts to New Zealanders - reported losing between $10,000 to $100,000 as the scammers gained control of their accounts through phishing, or social engineering tactics.
Senior sergeant Craig Bolton of the Auckland City Financial Crime Unit said the case was one of the first occasions where the Police had laid charges for a complex cyber crime.
Police did not say if the victims had been able to recover their losses.
4 Comments
In my beatific naivete I have a question: if one is sentenced to 400h of community work but also deported 2 days later, does the sentence still get fulfilled somehow?
On a somewhat related note, thank you for not editorialising (explicitly or otherwise) about the appropriateness of their sentences Juha. Rare in modern journalism.
Great work,there has to be a better way to catch mass texting by default across the network. These people would have been located within one cell for a long period of time. Its not like they are running around in a car spamming into different cells being chased by a RF detecting van.
No one at each provider noticed 100,000 x the national average text rate per day originating at this cell across just 64 sims at a time?
It appears there is no rate limit for any sim for text per day?
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