A person could easily get the impression the UK didn't police crime online, simply because crimes like DDOS attacks, cryptolockers, cryptocurrency scams, identity theft, fake tech support callers and suchlike are all typically cross-border crimes where the police have basically no powers.
The reality is the police are more than happy to act when the criminals involved can be identified, and are under their jurisdiction, and you can get the attention of the right department - that's just a very rare set of circumstances.
The UK police do have powers though, accessing computer systems without permission or committing fraud is a crime in the UK regardless of geographic location under the Computer Misuse Act 1990.
The Act explicitly mentions prosecution of offences committed abroad.
It's just really hard to do anything useful when the perpetrators, even if identifiable, are never going to set foot in the UK nor any country which has an extradition treaty with it.
If they had committed a less sophisticated crime they probably would have because in the UK there is a lot of crime that goes completely uninvestigated by the police. For example if they had gone out and stolen a motorcycle, even if that bike was fitted with a tracker that would give the police a lead as to where they were taking the bike to remove the tracker, the police would (at least in my area) not even investigate. As in just give the poor ex-bike owner a crime number for insurance via email and not visit or follow anything up at all.[1]
[1] Source: I am that poor ex-bike owner and I know anecdotally my experience is not unusual. I live in a nice area and a person in my neighbourhood had the steering wheel of their car stolen (for some reason) again, the police did nothing.
> do something as stupid as this and think they can get away with it in UK
They did get away with it for two years (2019 to 2021) and the article states there are other small groups doing exactly the same thing right here right now, so it isn't that stupid to think you could get away with it if you are very careful (and at least a bit lucky) and know when to cash out & move on.
Here's me thinking that at that age, half way through university, I could slap together a web page that looked like it came from the 80s (in the naughts); if these guys had applied the skills used here to something decent they could have actually done well for themselves.
