Deutsche Bank employee aids 419

FIFTEEN people including a high-ranking employee of Deutsche Bank in Madrid – were arrested for defrauding victims up to €40,000 a time with so-called Nigerian Letters. The group worked on the orders one Prince Emeka Nuanba, a Nigerian arrested earlier this year for sending hundreds of similar letters and emails to potential prey.

Seventeen premises were searched in different towns and cities at the end of October, with five Spaniards amongst the detainees as well as Britons, Nigerians and Germans.

In a “first” for an operation like this, the investigation led directly to a bank worker although Deutsche Bank was at no time aware of its employee’s role in the elaborate confidence trick.

The bank employee occupied an important post as the interventor – a combination of auditor and assistant manager – at the Deutsche Bank’s Paseo de la Castellana branch in the centre of Madrid.

Australians, Europeans, Mexicans and Saudi Arabians were amongst those who received official-looking letters informing them that they stood to inherit a vast sum from a dead relative of whose existence he or she was previously unaware.

Anyone who swallowed the bait was then told it was necessary to travel to Madrid in order to claim the inheritance. The money was held by the Bank of Spain and could only be paid out by Deutsche Bank, the bank employee would explain.

To get at the money, it was necessary to present paperwork which the bank was prepared to handle for a fee ranging from between €10,000 and €40,000, the interventor would tell those who believed the original letter.

Documents, apparently stamped by the Agencia Tributaria, Spain’s tax authority, gave procedures a veneer of respectability but as victims later found, they were as phoney as the hypothetical inheritance.

“We’re in this to get rich,” claimed the bank worker in a tapped telephone conversation and although only one per cent fall for the deception, with an estimated 40,000 letters and emails each day, the Nigerian Letters make money.

This latest investigation was just one more in ongoing police operations into scams which as well as lost inheritances sometimes inform recipients that they have won the Spanish lottery.

Another centres on dyed banknotes earmarked for philanthropic works in Africa, with punters promised a cut if they buy chemicals to return it to its original state. Other letters promise foreigners well-paid jobs in Spain in return for fees for dealing with the red tape.

Over the last seven years, National Police have received around 20,000 complaints and arrested more than 600 people linked to Nigerian letters, while returning more than 2.8 million euros to victims.

But the letters keep on coming and, incredibly, so do the victims.