Young money mules: The temptation

The pandemic was a hard time for young people, especially those trying to find jobs with the pandemic struggles causing a lot of young people to fall short. These people were often targeted by gangs and fraudsters as ‘money mules’. This was a tempting offer for many whom had no luck in finding another source of income. CIFAS (an independent fraud prevention service) found over

17,000 cases of people between the ages 21-30 had actually had transferred illicit funds through their own bank account as ‘mules’ to launder the proceeds of crime. As well as this, people aged 21-30 made up a whopping 42% of money mule activity during the pandemic.

In addition, the pandemic saw an increase in these cases as figures went up from 2017 by a huge 27%. During this time UK Finance announced that the period of the pandemic was prime for criminals to take advantage of the lack of employment opportunities. They also stated that the allure of the money would have been a very tempting prospect for people in these challenging times, with the lure of ‘easy money’ being promoted on social media and phishing via emails. Often when money mules were approached by recruiters, they used encrypted instant messaging services such as Snapchat, to make it easy to avoid detection.

When these opportunities arose for young people they are persuaded to provide their banking details in order to receive the money (minus the cut). These transactions made were extremely difficult to monitor and trace to link it back to the source of the funds which often were linked to serious crimes such as; drug trafficking, human smuggling and terrorism financing. However, despite the illicit source of the funds the mules were often unaware of the serious consequences and long prison sentences that such transactions can attract.

Worobec, the managing director of economic crime at UK Finance, said:

“Criminals were cruelly preying on 'generation Covid' and those struggling to find work at this difficult time, by using fake job adverts online to recruit people as money mules.”

And also

“At the same time, online platforms must take swift action to detect and take down content being used to promote money muling activity.”

During this time CIFAS and UK Finance also urged people to follow the ‘Don’t be fooled’ campaign. This campaign teaches people to only give bank details to trusted close people. Also, the Online Safety Bill has aimed to tackle this issue by ensuring that search engines and platforms have a duty of care to protect users from fraudulent activity and promotion of fraudulent material.

Finally, the retail fraud director at Lloyds bank, said fraudsters use fake profiles (with photos) to lure people in. They also said:

“Tempting offers that sound too good to be true probably are, so it's important people think about the consequences like being left with no bank account, a damaged credit score and even prison – before biting off more than they can chew.”

LLoyds bank has since created a “mule hunting” team in 2018 which has since uncovered more than 85,000 mule accounts and stopped a totalof £60 Million from falling into the hands of fraudsters.