Two Britons jailed for £1.5m phishing scams

Two Britons responsible for phishing scams that stole over £1.5m from UK students have received jail sentences totalling almost ten years.

Damola Clement Olatunji (pictured below) was sentenced by the Southwark Crown Court to 6.5 years on 8 July for his involvement in the scam.

Earlier, a second man, Amos Njoroge Mwangi was sentenced to three years, three months in jail for his involvement in a similar scheme.

The two were involved in phishing scams that reportedly targeted hundreds of UK students using compromised personal data to dupe its victims.

"Mwangi and Olatunji were determined fraudsters who systematically targeted British students in order to steal large amounts of money," said Metropolitan Police Central e-Crime Unit (PCeU) detective inspector Jason Tunn.

"Despite the complexity of the investigation, PCeU investigators working closely with the Student Loan Company and other partners, were able to identify those responsible and bring them to justice."

The two are not believed to have worked together, though their scams ran in similar ways, seeing the two target students with emails masquerading as government loan schemes.

The emails invited its victims to update their details on their student loan account via a link to a bogus website. When clicked, the link enabled the scammers to access victims' personal information, including bank details.

The two stole between £1,000 to £5,000 from each victim they successfully duped.

The PCeU claimed that computers seized from Mwangi revealed he had numerous computer programmes which enabled him to build phishing emails and register fake websites.

The unit also found in excess of 1,300 student loan account log-in details on assets seized from Olatunji, linking him to £304,000 worth of actual fraud and a further £162,000 attempted fraud.

The two cyber crooks sentencing follows on from warning by Microsoft during its Trustworthy Computing (TwC) press event that Europe's cyber crime market is booming.