British teens recruited to world's most feared mafia - the Black Axe gang
Law enforcement agencies warn that the Black Axe gang is preying upon debt-ridden students and professionals working at large organisations, offering them an opportunity to make fast cash.
Some are used as 'money mules' who facilitate the transfer of fraudulent money through their bank accounts.
Multinational gangs including Black Axe are now responsible for a majority of the world's cyberfraud, according to Interpol.
Recruits, who are often male, are first required to undergo an 'initiation' ceremony which involves being stripped, tortured and made to drink blood, before they become 'Axemen'.
Not only does the gang target well-healed professionals, many of its recruiters often hold jobs in the IT industry.
Detectives say the gang uses Snapchat to distribute registration forms, taking advantage of instantly disappearing 'snap' messages to cover up their fraudulent activities, the Irish Times reported.
However, the social network's parent company Snap Inc. insisted content suspected to be illegal is saved and reported to authorities.
Black Axe, which operates as a mafia-style organisation, has an estimated 30,000 members across dozens of countries worldwide. More Trending
It is thought to take as much as £3.8billion from victims each year through its scams, which also include romance and inheritance frauds as well as phishing and ransomware.
Among the recruits of the scheme was 26-year-old university graduate Funmi Abimbola, who was jailed for three years last October for laundering money.
The bank worker was said to have had 'many good qualities', but was lured into the crime group, for which he provided bank accounts for the transfer of money.
Ireland's Operation Skein has so far identified 1,400 individuals connected to Black Axe.
It has prosecuted more than 300 affiliated people, cautioned 39 juveniles, and identified more than 1,000 money mules during the investigation.
'Individuals need to realise that if they act as a money mule, they are interacting with vicious transnational organised criminals', said Garda Detective Inspector Michael Cryan.
He added that the gang 'controls' its recruits, demanding that they hand themselves over in the event money is stopped or frozen by their bank.
'People who get involved in this are destroying their own futures because they could go to jail, end up with a criminal record and be prevented from getting jobs.'
Forces from 196 countries are also able to draw on data from Interpol, which has created an intelligence database on the gang.
Interpol dealt a 'major blow' to the gang after coordinating a huge operation which saw more than 300 people linked to Black Axe and affiliated groups arrested worldwide, including in the UK and Ireland.
The probe, codenamed Operation Jackal III, recovered £2.24million in stolen assets including luxury items and cryptocurrencies, and saw more than 700 bank accounts frozen.
It also uncovered large transactions to Nigerian bank accounts.
A senior official for the multinational crime organisation said that Black Axe were 'early adopters' in money transfer technology. More Trending
Tomonobu Kaya said that the rise of fintech banks, which operate digitally and have little to no physical presence, have helped facilitate the quick and seamless transfer of money around the world.
In another operation, three members of the same family in the UK were jailed for more than 16 years after being found to have worked with Black Axe's alleged leader.
The Nakpodia siblings laundered more than £1million through email and phone scams between 2007 and 2015 for their Nigerian-based brother-in-law Augustus Bemigho-Eyeoyibo.
A BBC investigation into the Nigerian gang also found evidence of severe torture and brutality from pictures of dead bodies shared on social media.
Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@metro.co.uk.
For more stories like this, check our news page.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Metro
an hour ago
- Metro
At least six dead after gunman opens fire at popular market in Bangkok
At least six people have been killed in a mass shooting at a food market in Thailand. The attack happened at Or Tor Kor – a market usually buzzing with tourists – in the Chatuchak district in northern Bangkok. Got a story? Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@ Or you can submit your videos and pictures here. For more stories like this, check our news page. Follow on Twitter and Facebook for the latest news updates. You can now also get articles sent straight to your device. Sign up for our daily push alerts here. MORE: Map shows Thailand-Cambodia border where UK tourists warned to 'take extra care' MORE: Nine bar staff arrested for beating on British tourist over £460 bill MORE: Woman 'filmed herself having sex with Buddhist monks and blackmailed them for £9,000,000'
Daily Record
2 hours ago
- Daily Record
Brit family fly to France to search for man missing for 10 days
Robert Kincaid was last seen at Charles De Gaulle Airport, where he failed to board his flight home. The family of a missing British man who didn't board his flight home ten days ago are preparing to fly to France to begin searching for him. Robert Kincaid from Tullycarnet in East Belfast, had been working on an oil rig in Benin and was due to fly home on July 17. However, the 38-year-old missed his connecting flight at Charles De Gaulle Airport in Paris to Dublin and has not been heard from since. Later that evening, his family attempted to FaceTime him but the phone was answered by a man they did not know. A second call was picked up by a woman. Since then, all attempts to reach him have failed. Speaking to Belfast Live, Robert's brother Louis said his disappearance was completely out of character, and the family is now 'up to high dough with worry.' 'Robert had been working on an oil rig in Benin and was due to fly back on 17th July. He missed his flight at ten past seven from Charles De Gaulle Airport, and his phone is completely off now,' Louis said. 'When we spoke to him around eight o'clock, he had missed his flight and had had a few drinks on him. We tried to contact him around ten o'clock that night on FaceTime, and it was answered by a black man who appeared to be in a corrugated hut. He spoke with broken English and said that the phone was on zero percent, then it cut off. 'We rang him again the following day, and the phone was answered by a woman, and we could hear a baby crying in the background, but the phone is now completely gone, and calls and messages aren't going through.' Louis said the family reported Robert missing to the PSNI and have been in contact with the British Embassy in Paris, but so far they have received no information. 'We have contacted the British Embassy and the PSNI. Everything is being done through Interpol but as of yet we have heard absolutely nothing. 'We haven't been able to get in contact with the French police, and the Embassy has said that they are restricted in terms of what they can tell us other than he is not in any of the hospitals or medical centres. 'We are up to high dough with worry. It has been ten days, and it is completely out of character for us to have no phone contact. 'We are preparing to fly out for a couple of days on Wednesday to do a mini search. I know it will be like looking for a needle in a haystack, and I am not sure what we will accomplish, but we have to do something.' Join the Daily Record WhatsApp community!
Daily Mirror
3 hours ago
- Daily Mirror
'I was born through rape in a war-zone - when I met my mother I saw my face in hers'
Sexual violence is a terrible inevitability of any war-zone. Lejla Damon was born of rape during the Bosnian war. She speaks to the Mirror about finding her birth mother and discovering her roots Smuggled across a border at just nine days old, Lejla Damon knew little of her birth mother. But as she grew up, she discovered that her beginnings were rooted in conflict. Speaking to exclusively to The Mirror, Lejla tells me she is a child of sexual violence carried out during the Bosnian war. We spoke about the first time she met her birth mother and returning to Bosnia, where staff at the maternity unit knew her story before she did. Lejla was born on Christmas Day 1992 in war-torn Bosnia. Her mother had endured an horrendous ordeal. Lejla's birth mother, who we will not be identifying here to ensure her privacy, was held for seven months in a school at the beginning of the conflict. It was during this time that she was repeatedly raped and tortured. She said: 'The premise of it was to impregnate and hold on to the women for as long as possible knowing that they wouldn't be able to get an abortion and then let them go when they were too heavily pregnant.' She explains that the aim of this was 'to change the genetic makeup of a society.' So when the two journalists who would go on to become Lejla's parents met her birth mother, she was in a state of extreme suffering. Dan and Sian Damon were in Bosnia to report on the conflict for a British news broadcaster, when they interviewed Lejla's birth mother. In that video interview, Lejla tells me that, her mother said: 'I would become like the men that raped her and that if she held me that she would strangle me.' Talking to me now, she says she has enormous sympathy for her mother. She explains: 'It takes courage to give your child up for adoption no matter what you went through… she allowed me to have an incredible life full of extreme privilege.' Growing up in the UK, Lejla said she felt, like all kids, the intense urge to fit in with her peers. But when in primary school, her class were tasked with creating an 'About Me' Powerpoint slide, she came to know more about her roots. Lejla was able to research the day she was born, but when she asked her mother about the time, she was told about being adopted from Bosnia during the conflict. Later, before she went off to university, her parents told her that she was a child born of rape. Return to Bosnia At university, she met a documentary student, and travelled to Bosnia in search of her birth mother. This set off an incredible chain of events. Lejla visited the new maternity hospital, where a nurse recognised her. 'There was a nurse there that knew who I was, who knew who my adoptive Dad was,' she says. 'He was like, 'I can't believe you've come back'... This is a person that knew what had happened before. There's things about my story that I don't remember,' she adds. For more stories like this subscribe to our weekly newsletter, The Weekly Gulp, for a curated roundup of trending stories, poignant interviews, and viral lifestyle picks from The Mirror's Audience U35 team delivered straight to your inbox. But it wasn't until later that same year when she made contact with her birth mother. Lejla was able to track her mother down through the Bosnian Embassy in the UK. After finding her birth mother, the embassy connected the pair. When Lejla heard the news that her mother was found, was alive, and wanted to be put in contact with her, she said it felt 'really intense and it was amazing.' But then the practicalities of contact crept in, she said she then thought: 'I don't speak Bosnian. I wasn't just going to call'. So instead, they opted to write letters to each other, to allow one another to digest their feelings and take the time they needed to respond. The Bosnian Embassy in the UK translated these letters on behalf of the mother and daughter. They then agreed to meet in person, so Lejla flew out with her parents to Bosnia to meet her birth mother. She tells me about the strangeness in entering the room, about the tears shed upon seeing her mother, whose facial features resembled her own, their cheek-bone structure echoing the others. All these new emotions - of who this new person is - was heightened as her parents had already met her birth mother, during that fateful interview in 1992. Her birth grandmother forbade them to meet, but had passed away by the time the mother and daughter made contact. Lejla said that having a baby born of sexual violence, 'there's stigma attached to that going back to the family. There was great stigma in my story… There is a huge amount of shame connected towards it.' Ongoing wars Lejla now works with War Child, where she has built connections with other children who were conceived in this way. When the news of the Ukrainian war hit headlines, Lejla says she couldn't help but think of the terrible inevitability of sexual violence. She said: 'A conflict without sexual violence isn't a thing, so there will be many different children born out sexual violence whether it's Ukraine [or] any of the conflicts that are going on [in] Sudan [and] Gaza.' There is 'no real deterrent' for sexual violence committed during war-time, Lejla says, as many perpetrators are never brought to justice. She describes how in Bosnia many victims live in the same villages as those who raped them during the war, who carry on living their lives unheeded. In this context, Lejla explains that 'justice and accountability is a real challenge' as by coming forward, victims are giving up their right to anonymity. She adds: 'Nothing really happened to the perpetrators that committed these crimes. Where is the deterrent of doing it in future conflicts?' Working with the charity Remembering Srebrenica, Lejla is an advocate for learning from the past to ensure that genocides never happen again. We discuss the on-going genocide in Gaza. There are similarities between the atrocities of the past in Bosnia and the atrocities of the present in Palestine. Lejla says: 'It's blatant annihilation, this isn't a small thing: food, withholding aid, bombing hospitals … The conflict [in Palestine] is playing out in the same way [as] the Bosnian war was not that long ago.' She adds: 'It's like we've not ever learned from what's happened previously, all the atrocities that have happened before [and] all the genocides.' Lejla says that, 'across the world there is a lot of lack of empathy.' She adds: 'Ultimately we need to do more within policy to actually take action against the countries that are committing genocide.' If you have been affected by this story, contact Rape Crisis England & Wales for free confidential support and information on 08088029999 or their website or 08088010302 if you're calling from Scotland. You can contact the Domestic and Sexual Abuse helpline on 0808 802 1414 if you are in Ireland.
