SOCA - Online Fraudsters Defraud Britons off Millions of Pounds

According to the Serious Organized Crime Agency (SOCA), a non-departmental public body in the UK and the central agency for law enforcement, individual Britons are getting defrauded off hundred of millions of pounds every year as online scammers from West Africa target them (users in Britain).

The SOCA has highlighted that organized cyber criminal groups in Ghana and Nigeria are setting up fake online profiles on online dating websites featuring photographs of good-looking women and men. They dispatch bulk spam messages on a monthly basis to Internet users across the UK.

The senders of these spam mails begin by asking recipients to pay small amounts for things like telephone calls and stamps. With the passage of time, the sum gets larger. E-mail recipients are falsely informed that a sick relative requires an operation, or that there's going to be a change in the ownership of the individual's house. Some victims even re-mortgaged their houses so that they could dispatch money, resulting in the drainage of their bank accounts.

According to the SOCA, these e-mail scams appear to be getting more-and-more sophisticated and increasingly plausible since cyber criminals often manage to stay just ahead of law enforces and publicity.

The SOCA further warns that victims not only expend a large financial and personal cost owing to these scams, the scammers frequently use the deceptively-collected money for financing other crimes like people trafficking and drug peddling. Scams categorized as "Boiler room" frauds in which the sale of fake shares takes place at artificially raised prices, Ponzi schemes, counterfeit check scams, bogus lotteries are the rest of scams associated with these spam mails.

Indeed, some scams even posed as the assistance from fraud tackling organizations, including SOCA, for professional services to victims wish to retrieve their money.

Commenting on such fraud recovery scams, Colin Woodcock (Fraud Expert at SOCA) stated that if anyone thought they couldn't touch him, the Agency would state that complacency was one great danger, as reported by Press Association on June 1, 2010.

Finally, Woodcock said that scammers reaped 3.5 Billion annually from the UK inhabitants, so it was unlikely that they'd stop their activities there. But if people became wiser, probably the criminals would move to something else.

Related article: SEC Imposes Trading Ban on 35 Companies

» SPAMfighter News - 6/9/2010