I read this article the other day that suggests one in ten British adults has been a victim of mass marketing scams. The most common scams include Nigerian pen scams and notifications of winning a foreign lottery. More than 3.2 million people have been conned out of their hard earned cash by one of these scams according to the Office of Fair Trading. Many of the gangs who run these scams are based in English speaking parts of Nigeria and West Africa and use their profits as funding for drug trafficking, according this article. In a month long investigation in Nigeria investigators seized more than 4,500 fake cheques, postal orders and bank drafts with a value of around £8m. Most of the scams involve the victim having to pay an advance fee to claim a prize or to have a large amount of money transferred to their account. As always if it seems too good to be true, it almost certainly is.
