A man has been jailed for eight-and-a-half years after enabling cybercriminals to defraud around one million victims in 91 countries.
Minshull Street Crown Court in Manchester, heard that Zak Coyne, 24, from Huddersfield in West Yorkshire, helped more than 2,000 scammers steal at least £100m by running a subscription-based service via his website called LabHost.
Judge Jenny Lester-Ashworth described LabHost as enabling fraud “on an industrial scale”.
During sentencing on Monday, she told the defendant: “It was one of the most professional and sophisticated websites in the world for committing online fraud.
“You also enjoyed what you were doing and also by being immersed in the criminal underworld operating online.”
The court heard Coyne, who was described as being on the autism spectrum, had an “obsessional interest” in computer programming and received around £200,000 from criminals subscribing to his services, paid for in cryptocurrency he converted to sterling.
LabHost was an online subscription-based service hosting phishing pages – fake versions of 185 major banking, government and commercial websites, including Amazon, Netflix, Uber and UK banks.
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Subscribers would then send messages to their intended victims, often saying there had been a problem with the account, getting the customer to log in to the fake website pages and stealing their details.
Simon Gurney, prosecuting, told the court that Coyne’s website had caused global losses of more than £100m, of which £32m was from the UK alone.
He added: “It is likely that the losses caused were substantially greater. The risk of loss occasioned by the frauds committed through LabHost can be measured in multiple billions of pounds.”
The platform was brought down in April 2024 following an investigation which included the Cyber Crime Unit within the Metropolitan Police, Europol and other international police forces.
Thomas Short, specialist prosecutor for the Crown Prosecution Service, said: “This was a sophisticated worldwide criminal enterprise which enabled others to perpetrate fraud on a massive scale.
“Fraud is far from a victimless crime and the harm caused by Coyne’s offending are measured not just in monetary terms, but also in the distress inflicted on countless victims who fell prey to these scams.”
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Adam Roxborough, defending Coyne, said: “He actually did not give any real thought to the overall scale of what he was enabling.
“Once he engaged, it became something of an obsession with him.”
Coyne, a father-of-one, was arrested in April 2024 in the departures lounge at Manchester Airport. He admitted two offences of fraud and one of transferring criminal property at an earlier hearing.
LabHost was co-created by Coyne and a Canadian individual, who has not been identified, in August 2021.
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