A criminal has been sentenced at Inner London Crown Court to over a year in prison for operating a SMS Blaster to conduct a mass smishing campaign against victims with the intent to harvest their personal details to be used in fraud.

The sentencing follows an investigation and arrest by the Dedicated Card and Payment Crime Unit (DCPCU), a specialist banking industry sponsored police unit.

The conviction was achieved thanks to the officers from the DCPCU working with mobile network operators including BT, Virgin Media O2, VodafoneThree and Sky as well as the National Cyber Security Centre and Ofcom.

Between 22 and 27 March 2025 Ruichen Xiong, a student from China had installed an SMS Blaster in his vehicle to commit smishing fraud, targeting tens of thousands of potential victims.

Xiong drove around the Greater London area in a Black Honda CR-V. This vehicle was used to hold and transport an SMS Blaster around in the boot.

An SMS Blaster allows offenders to send fraudulent text messages to phones within the vicinity of the equipment and acts as an illegitimate phone mast to send messages. The blaster will draw mobile devices away from legitimate networks by appearing to have a stronger signal. By doing so, the criminal is then able to send a text message to the victim's phone.

The equipment was programmed to send out SMS messages to victims within a nearby radius of the blaster, designed to look like trustworthy messages from genuine organisations, such as government bodies, where the victim was encouraged to click a link. The link would subsequently take them to a malicious site that was designed to harvest their personal details.