Elderly friend scammed by fake Nigerian website. I have tracked down their bank account...

Sumarokov

I am not terribly sure if this is the right forum for my post, but I am posting it here anyway. Other posters were incredibly helpful on a plumbing (!) issue I had, so I feel confident I will get some helpful replies here.

Basically, a very dear, retired, very elderly friend of mine has been conned out of a large sum of money by a website advertising as offering publishing services. They pretended to be a bunch of academics, but I suspected something was not right from the start when the "academics" could not even spell their own "English" names with any consistency!

She is embarrassed and inclined to write off the money. I have done some investigating of my own and have tracked them down to Nigeria. But they are using a correspondent bank account based in London. How am I best going about getting the authorities involved? The problem is that my friend does not live in the UK and, as she is elderly, she prefers to just let the matter slide (so I can only do so much on her behalf, as I am not the injured party). However, I am very aggrieved on her behalf.

I wonder if anyone can give me any advice? Contact the bank themselves? I thought of speaking to an MP. I had a look at how to report financial crimes, but it all needs to be done online and they use "one size fits all" online forms which naturally end up in "computer says no" messages.

The subject over which she was conned was actually legacy papers linked to quite a famous person, so I wonder if a journalist might be interested in getting involved? My main aim is to get these crooks to return her money and to get their fake website closed down, so they cannot con other innocent people...

BoGoF

If she doesn't live in the UK then you are struggling to get any authorities interested, nor will an MP be interested in a non-constitutent.

That leaves the bank, I am assuming it is a UK bank? Do they know your friend is abroad. They could take it up with the bank (they wont speak to you though) but if they didnt know the person doesn't live in the UK then there is a danger the account will be closed.

MeteredOut

Is it the scammers bank who is in the UK, or her bank? Or both? Has she tried going via her own bank? Can you share the sum of monies involved? How did she transfer the monies to the scammers?

DullGreyGuy

It would need to go to the police where she is resident. 

In what way/how have you tracked down their bank account? As in its the bank account they gave her to transfer funds to? If thats the case then its almost certainly not their account but another person had by the fraudsters