Soca warning for "money mules"

[PatchGirl]

Police chiefs are urging people looking for work during the recession to be alert to online scams that trick them into laundering money.

The Serious Organised Crime Agency (Soca) says websites are currently being used to recruit "money mules".

The "mules" are ordinary people who send and receive payments through their bank accounts to facilitate business.

But in reality, the cash has been laundered from crime, leaving unwitting mules open to prosecution.

The warning comes at the beginning of the annual Get Safe Online week, a campaign jointly run by government and banks to alert people to the dangers of fraud on the internet.

According to the campaign, fraudsters are using a variety of bogus and legitimate recruitment channels to con job-hunters into thinking they have found genuine employment.

But in each case the job comes down to asking the victim to receive relatively small amounts of money into their own account and then move them onwards to another bank.

With jobs hard to come by it's easy to understand how some people could be duped.

Tony Neate, head of GetSafeOnline.org, said: "At any given time, there are approximately 100 known mule recruitment sites targeting the UK, each of which may have around 50 active mules.