According to news reports, the Tel Aviv police fraud squad intercepted a team of nine Israelis believed to probably be of East European descent, who had defrauded US senior citizens and pensioners of millions of dollars under the cover of a so-called Nigerian scam. The spunky criminals even had a posh office in the downtown area of Tel Aviv.
It is increasingly clear that the identity of Nigerians has been hijacked by international criminal mafias in order to perpetrate their evil schemes undetected.
Some of the main culprits of this international fraud who abuse the name of Nigeria and Nigerians in their nefarious plots are actually Israelis based in Israel.
The fraudsters, all in their 20s and 30s, would phone American pensioners, or contact them by e-mail notices. They would then inform the Americans that they had won the lottery and ask them for a fee of several thousand dollars for the transfer of the prize money.
Recently, it was reported that the American agencies had urged the Israeli police to step up law enforcement and take measures to stem what had become an epidemic of fraud coming from Israel, targeted against U.S. citizens and often garbed to appear as if it were a scam attempt from Nigeria.
At the time of reporting, it was also disclosed that the US police has been prodding their Israeli counterparts to speed up the extradition procedure of another ten Israelis who were suspected of scamming $2 million in similar operation.
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