Dear Editor,
Criminal justice practice in the UK presents the practitioner with unfettered access to information, one of which is the sight of people’s criminal records. The case I am about to ventilate has been one of my earliest and most noted. I have omitted significant pieces of information for obvious reasons. I have perused all the documentation on this case and it presents a depressing narrative of gullibility and greed.
An 18-year-old opened an account at a leading high street bank in one of the UK’s major cities. He produced a South African passport as a proof of ID. This was later confirmed as a forgery. Bank records over the period of 6 months showed that the staggering amount of over a million pounds passed through his account. The payments were received from people from countries as diverse as Canada, Australia, USA, New Zealand and from the regions of Europe and Asia. This young man withdrew the majority of this cash within a 6-month period in instalments of ₤80,000. There are instances when he withdrew ₤200,000 a week! Where did he send it? To his parents in Nigeria. The Immigration Department through their investigations confirmed that this young man had been in the UK illegally and that he was Nigerian and not South African as he earlier purported. But why were these people from disparate parts of the world sending him money? The letters that I have seen refer to prizes and gifts. A Search and Seizure Warrant under the Proceeds of Crime Act was executed at his prepossessing penthouse by the police from the Commercial Fraud Unit and the search revealed that he and his co-accused were dispatching thousands of e-mails around the world informing people that they had ‘won’ a lottery. Given the innate greed in most of us this con trick worked.
The police search revealed an Aladdin’s cave of hundreds of computers, DVD players, laptops, printers, digital cameras, video cameras, ₤40,000 in cash,10 plasma televisions, dozens of credit cards and cheque books, which when scrutinized by the Documents Verification Unit proved to be forgeries. A rodomontade-laced letter to his mother caught my notice. In it he said how “well” he was doing in the UK and proceeded to itemise and quantify his “achievements.” As his case manager, I confronted among other things, the issue of victim empathy. I found that he had no remorse for what he had done and no empathy with his victims. He was unmitigatedly selfish, taking advantage of the unfathomable liminal oppor-tunities that globalisation has provided in the area of acquisitive criminality and tapping into the innate greed and gullibility in most of us.
Yours faithfully,
Joseph B Collins
