By Tom Payne And Victoria Bischoff For The Dailyi Mail
Published: 22:02 BST, 12 May 2019 | Updated: 02:04 BST, 13 May 2019
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Criminals are recruiting schoolchildren as young as 11 to launder their dirty money.
Ruthless gangs have been targeting children on their way to school to enlist them as ‘mules’, police say.
Although gangs have long used others’ bank accounts to hide their activity, a Daily Mail investigation can reveal the scale of the threat to young people.
Many are lured with promises of quick, easy cash if they let strangers use their accounts to deposit and move funds. In return, they keep a cut – sometimes as little as £60 – or are given ‘prizes’ such as a pair of trainers.
Money launderers promote their 'businesses' on Instagram in order to lure youngsters
Some 10,686 under-21s were caught acting as mules last year – a rise of 26 per cent on 2017, according to the fraud prevention service Cifas.
The trend follows the spread of ‘county lines’ gangs recruiting youngsters as drug-runners. A Mail investigation found that:
Police are to send warning letters about the phenomenon to every parent in the country; Middle-class youngsters have become prime targets as criminals seek ‘clean’ accounts that are less likely to raise suspicions; Some victims are forced into becoming mules – including a 15-year-old boy in London who handed over his account details after being threatened at knifepoint; Students from elite universities, including Oxford, are reportedly being recruited on campus by gangs who ‘groom’ them with days out and designer clothes; Thousands more are being enlisted over social media by fraudsters using secret code words; Police say they are locked in a ‘cat and mouse game’ with recruiters who open new social media accounts as soon as one is blocked; Gangs are even boarding buses packed with children travelling to school and using Bluetooth technology to send ‘adverts’ directly to their smartphones.
In February conman Alexander Ogun-Moweta, 27, was jailed at London’s Southwark Crown Court for using young mules’ bank accounts in a £200,000 fraud racket
In a sign of the scale of the problem, Lloyds Bank said cases involving under-16s acting as mules jumped five-fold from January to March this year, compared with the same period last year.
Barclays has logged a 137 per cent year-on-year increase – and a ten-fold leap since 2016.
Lloyds says it
