NCA-LED OPERATION SEES 30 DETAINED OVER WEST AFRICAN SCAMS

Around 30 suspects have been detained in West Africa following a global law enforcement operation targeting online fraud, including romance scams affecting people in the UK, according to the National Crime Agency. The operation, which ran between 6 and 9 October, focused on sites in Nigeria and Ghana and followed a "joint disruption week" hosted by the NCA in London that brought together more than 100 officials from technology firms and police forces. In the Sasaabi area of the Accra region in Ghana, officers detained 19 people, seized 303 electronic devices and identified 117 suspected victims of human trafficking. In Nigeria's Delta state, nine further people were detained, along with 35 mobile phones, six laptops and 12 internet routers. As part of the broader effort, Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, said it had removed around 3.7 million accounts linked to fraudulent activity, including romance scams.

The NCA's deputy director of fraud, Nick Sharp, said investment scams targeting British citizens originate "primarily from overseas and West Africa" and often begin as romance fraud. He said perpetrators use romance fraud "as a way of bringing the victim in and introducing them to investment opportunities", describing significant overlap between the two forms of crime. Sharp also said many so-called sextortion cases, in which perpetrators threaten to share intimate images unless victims pay, are believed to originate in the same region. He added that scammers also impersonate well-known brands and recognisable public figures on social media to target people in the UK.

The NCA said it is not yet clear how many of the identified victims were British or how much money individual victims lost, though the operation uncovered what the agency described as 11 million potential victim records. One outlet reported that the suspects had been accused of targeting lonely British pensioners specifically, a detail not confirmed in the NCA's own account. The agency has not set out further confirmed steps beyond the arrests and seizures already carried out.