In January of this year, the UK police disclosed that some schools in Ghana were teaching school kids above the age of 10 to catfish single women from Britain and engage in romance scams with them, exploiting them for money exchange.
The issue was brought to light when a team of journalists from a reputed daily engaged in an undercover operation to unravel the people behind catfishing. To their surprise, they found a few school children groomed with cyber lessons to smartly coax males and females from developed nations into engaging in such embarrassing activities that they had no choice but to pay the hacker a hefty amount to avoid any online embarrassment.
Now, authorities in the UK have issued an advisory to the Ghanaian Police on the damage caused by romance scams and how to prevent children from being groomed into catfishing and other activities such as defrauding people in Britain.
Nik Adams is leading the response against fraud and has stipulated certain preventive guidelines to school-going would-be hackers on how to not fall prey to online hackers and fraudsters and target wealthy single women, as it can lead to serious legal consequences.
As this crime and related crimes are seeing a sharp rise in and around London, the police authorities contacted the Ghanaian government with a scheme to increase the morale of people, especially children, to speak out against crime and its perpetuation.
Note 1: Catfishing is nothing but luring an online victim into a relationship with a fake profile and then engaging in the crime of extortion, which can lead to the death of the victim under certain circumstances.
Note 2: For the past few weeks, a new WhatsApp scam has emerged on the web, where scammers from countries like Singapore, Malaysia, and Vietnam are calling victims to gain personal information or to win their trust in order to take the romance scam to the next level. As per the analysis conducted by South Indian Police officials, people as young as teens are being hired to engage the victims in scams and are being lured with hefty paychecks on a monthly basis.
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