Gangs (19 page)

At first these new communications were still being sent out of Lagos but a crack-down by Nigerian authorities – who make up to fifty arrests each week – has forced the gangs to set themselves up further afield, greatly aided by the global nature of the Internet and the advent of high-tech communications. A telephone call to Nigeria can be easily and instantly transferred to anywhere else in the world with the caller being none the wiser.

One recent police operation in east London led to the arrest of a Nigerian who had succeeded in ripping off two businessmen, one in Alaska, the other in Australia (it is an unwritten rule of the scam that you don’t fleece anyone in the country you are operating from). Both victims thought they were communicating with an official from the Central Bank of Nigeria in Lagos rather than a man sitting in a back bedroom in Leytonstone.

What particularly intrigues me about Tao’s email is the Amsterdam connection: 419 victims are often invited out to Nigeria or other parts of Africa on the premise that they need to be there to oversee some paperwork before the final transaction can be completed. Regardless of the destination, such journeys are not to be recommended.

In July 2001 Joseph Raca, a sixty-eight-year-old former mayor of Northampton, travelled to South Africa to complete a business deal that had begun some weeks earlier with a letter offering him the financial opportunity of a lifetime.

Having made and received dozens of phone calls, all of which only served to convince Raca that the offer was genuine, the trip abroad was supposed to be a final formality: sign a few papers and earn millions of pounds in commission. Raca was met by a man and a woman at Johannesburg International airport and driven out to the suburb of East Rand where he was taken into a house to meet Mr Ford, the man he had been speaking with. For the first twenty minutes or so the conversation was jovial and friendly. Mr Ford explained that, although the money was ready and waiting, there were a few small problems. A cash payment of £7000 was needed before the final transfer could be made.

When Raca explained that he didn’t have access to that kind of money, Ford suggested they travel to an ATM so Raca could withdraw as much as possible from his credit cards. When Raca refused, the atmosphere suddenly turned nasty.

‘One of the men pulled a gun from the small of his back and placed it against the back of my head. One of the others started stripping off my clothes, frisking me and then taking all my possessions. They said they were going to shoot me and dump my body in the jungle. I really believed I was going to die and I was just trying to survive. I prayed and begged for my life to be spared. Ford took out a machete and tried to cut my ear off. Then they told me to wrap a towel around my knee to staunch the flow of blood as they were going to shoot me in the leg to show they meant business.

‘I was very frightened. I’m not ashamed to say that I crawled and begged. They were using foul language and told me they would kill me if I didn’t do everything they said.’

Raca was instructed to call his wife, Aurielia, in Northampton, and explain that unless she paid a ransom of £20,000 within twenty-four hours, he would be killed. But his captors had reckoned without the resourcefulness of the former Polish naval lieutenant, who first arrived in Britain fifty years earlier after jumping from his ship into the sea at Hull docks and claiming political asylum.

As his terrified wife listened to his plight, Raca broke into Polish and told her to call the police while he did his best to stall the gang. When he called back the next day, Aurielia informed her husband that the police were on their way. Having liaised with the South African authorities and traced the phone number, two Northampton detectives were flying to South Africa at that very moment to help with the rescue.

Raca’s sudden confidence at the end of the call made the gang nervous. As police closed in on the house they fled, dumping Raca on the roadside. He had been held hostage for nearly fifty hours.

Raca was one of the lucky ones. When sixty-one-year-old Tory councillor and professional troubleshooter David Rollings left his home in Bristol to travel to Nigeria to retrieve some £2 million that had been fleeced from some of his business associates in a 419 scam, he was determined not to come back empty-handed. Rollings knew Nigeria well, having made dozens of business trips to Lagos over the years. Staff at his favourite hotel, the five-star Ikoyi in the heart of the city, greeted him warmly when he arrived on a breezy Saturday morning.

Rollings left early on Monday morning, hoping to confront the fraudster, but returned after just half an hour looking shaken. ‘It was obvious that something was very wrong,’ the Ikoyi’s manageress, Fatima Mohammed said later. ‘David was sweating profusely and appeared to be extremely upset.’

Refusing to be comforted by the staff, Rollings curtly demanded his key and returned to his room. Half an hour later, ‘There was a terrific bang. Everyone in the hotel heard it and we all ran about knocking on all the doors trying to find out where it had come from. For a few minutes there was chaos, people everywhere, but then when we got to David’s room there was no reply.’

Inside, Rollings was sprawled on the bed with a single bullet-hole in the back of his head. The room was neat and tidy – there had been no attempt to rob him. No gun was found in the room and his killer is now thought to have slipped away during the initial flurry of activity that followed the gunshot. They have never been caught.

A few weeks earlier an American finance consultant by the name of Gerald Scruggs had also visited Lagos, staying in the five-star Sheraton in the city’s suburbs to oversee what he thought was a legitimate multi-million-dollar business opportunity that had fallen into his lap by way of a wealthy Nigerian lawyer.

Once Scruggs arrived, the lawyer, whom he had never met before, kept demanding more and more cash to ‘sweeten’ the final deal. After handing over thousands of dollars, Scruggs began to suspect that the glittering opportunity was made of fool’s gold and refused to pay any more.

When they found him, just outside the hotel grounds, he had been necklaced – a car tyre had been strung about his neck, doused with petrol, then set alight. As with Rollings, his killers have never been caught.

In the past ten years at least seventeen people have been killed in Nigeria while attempting to recover lost monies. Anxious to avoid becoming the next victim I had little desire to travel to Lagos, but having planned a trip to Amsterdam anyway, I found myself intrigued by the idea of being able to meet face to face one of the 419 fraudsters targeting the UK.

Having read through Tao’s original email a few times over the course of a week, I sit down at my computer and type a reply. I explain that I am the director of a small but profitable paper-handling company based in central London and that I’d be happy to help him in any way I can. It is less than twenty-four hours before I hear from him again.

This time I reply immediately, sending Tao my telephone number and telling him that, by a happy coincidence, I am planning to travel to Amsterdam on business in the next few weeks (though I neglect to mention that it is to research other chapters of this book). I tell him how excited I am about being able to help him with his difficulties and how much I look forward to meeting him. The next day Tao writes to me again:

I spend the next few days away from my office on the trail of coke-dealers in the north of England and when I return there is a voicemail message from Tao on my phone. I play it back and note that he sounds genuinely distraught, wondering why I have not yet sent my passport details. His situation, he explains, is getting more desperate by the day and I am his last hope.

I make a note of the number that he gives me but decide not to call him back right away. Instead I decide to get some expert advice on just what to expect if I arrange to go and meet Tao. I call up the offices of the National Criminal Intelligence Service and request a one-to-one briefing on the current state of advance-fee fraud and the Amsterdam connection.

A few days later, in a bare meeting room in one of the dozen or so buildings close to the river Thames that form the frontline of the battle against British organised crime, I am introduced to ‘Duncan’, who proceeds to give me a crash course on everything there is to know about the 419 gangs.

‘A lot of the people who get these letters and emails, they treat the whole thing as a joke and hit the delete button or throw them in the bin right away,’ Duncan explains. ‘They think, How could anyone be so stupid as to fall for this? Well, I have met the people who do. Some of them are stupid, others just naive and some are plain greedy. All of them are embarrassed about what has happened to them.’

Duncan’s figures show that, in 2002, British victims of 419 frauds who contacted NCIS had lost a total of £8 million. One man was fleeced of £1.4 million, another of more than £400,000. Three people were cheated out of £300,000 each while five more lost £250,000 each.

Shocking though these figures are, they represent just the tip of the iceberg. Dozens more victims would have reported their losses direct to one of the UK’s forty-three police forces and hundreds of others would have kept quiet and said nothing at all. Duncan suspects that a significant number of those who get involved are criminals themselves and the money lost is the proceeds of other frauds or drug-trafficking.

‘When it comes to those behind the scams, you’re talking about extremely clever people. When they are dealing with their potential victims they have mastered the art of coming across as trustworthy, well mannered and well educated. The fact is that the vast majority of Nigerians living in the UK are honest and respectable: these criminals trade off the good name of their community.

‘The Amsterdam thing is relatively new. A few years ago the goal was to get people to travel out to Lagos, but after a few cases of murder and kidnap many of the fraudsters realised that it was much harder to convince their victims to travel to what was seen as a dangerous third-world country. Few people have any such qualms about places like Paris, Amsterdam, Dublin, or even parts of South Africa, but the truth is these meetings can be dangerous, regardless of where they take place. All the indications are that incidents of kidnapping are becoming increasingly common.’

Duncan tells me he spends an increasing amount of his time guiding victims of 419 scams through a series of email and phone exchanges with the fraudsters and then accompanying them to a face-to-face meeting, usually in South Africa. There, working alongside the local police, the meeting is allowed to continue as long as it takes for the fraudsters to incriminate themselves before they are arrested.

It’s a slow, high-risk way of dealing with the gangs and even when the suspects are caught, there is often little chance of getting back any money that has already been lost, but Duncan believes it sends an important message to them. The focus on South Africa is at least partly responsible for the increasing number of scammers basing themselves in Europe.

‘So far as the latest trends are concerned, the fraudsters just get cleverer and their techniques get ever more refined. Instead of making up names at random, they are starting to use the names of real people – often staff at prominent banks or law firms – working on the presumption that people might go as far as to run the name through Google to see if the person is bona fide but are unlikely to phone them up at work, especially when the emails make it clear that all communication needs to be kept confidential.