An off-duty British Transport Police detective noticed something unusual on a King’s Cross Underground platform on 11 March 2025 — a man sitting with a suitcase that had holes in it and was emitting a green flash. That chance observation brought down a fraud operation that had been sending scam texts to Tube passengers and laundering hundreds of thousands of pounds through gift cards.
Four men have now been sentenced at Inner London Crown Court after the gang was found to have wheeled homemade SMS blasting devices through London Underground stations inside suitcases, bombarding nearby passengers with fake parcel delivery messages designed to harvest their banking details.
The ringleader, Zhijia Fan, 48, of Winchester Street in Acton, was jailed for four years and eight months after pleading guilty to conspiracy to defraud. The court heard he personally pocketed more than £100,000 from the scheme and acted as a handler for other members of the operation. Fan had at one point asked a co-defendant to wheel an SMS blaster around the Underground in a suitcase, though that particular plan failed due to a battery fault.
Gatis Lauks, 25, of Ealing, received a two-year suspended sentence after pleading guilty to fraud by false representation. His role was to convert stolen banking details into cash by using an app loaded with the compromised account information to buy gift cards in shops, earning a five percent commission on each transaction. In total, Lauks laundered around £600,000 through that process and is believed to have personally made approximately £30,000. He initially gave a no-comment interview to police in May 2025 but returned five days later to confess his involvement. He told the court he had been recruited in mid-2024 and received real-time remote technical support from a woman based in China.
Daoyan Shang, 20, of Caxton Road in Shepherd’s Bush, was sentenced to two years and ten months, also after changing his plea to guilty mid-trial. Wan Hafiz, 41, of Queensway in Paddington, was jailed for 14 months for conspiracy to defraud, with a further ten weeks for possession of articles for use in fraud, both terms running concurrently.
When officers searched addresses linked to Fan, Shang and Hafiz, they recovered 10,832 gift cards carrying more than £80,000 in fraudulently obtained funds. The cards had been used to purchase a range of goods including designer clothing, Louis Vuitton items, Pokemon cards and video games.
The sentencing judge described the operation as an extremely sophisticated fraud in which all four defendants had been knowing participants.
A fifth suspect, Jinhua Zhang, 58, absconded after being released on bail and remains at large. British Transport Police have asked anyone with information on his whereabouts to come forward.
