The stamp of approval: How scam works

Criminals buy a ‘suckers list’ of elderly people who have fallen victim to scams, or are likely to. These lists are often from databases sold on by charities.

The criminals then produce scam letters to trick them out of more money.

Scammers employ a company – such as Netherlands-based TRENDS – to print millions of copies of their scam letter, identical except for the victims’ details, and seal them in envelopes.

TRENDS pays postal giants such as Asendia, which has 350 staff in the UK, to take the letters to Britain. Asendia does not ask or check the content of letters.

Asendia transports letters to the UK, then contracts firms such as Whistl – a British firm which employs 1,600 – to sort them into postcode areas and put them into the Royal Mail system. Whistl does not ask or check the letters’ content.

Whistl delivers the sorted letters into Royal Mail regional sorting offices, from which Royal Mail postmen deliver the letters to victims in the UK – the ‘final mile’. Royal Mail does not check with Whistl what the content of the letters is.

Vulnerable people in the UK receive the letters with Royal Mail branding on them and believe they are genuine.

They send cash and cheques back to the criminals’ post boxes, which are managed by TRENDS.

TRENDS sends money to a payment processing firm such as PacNet.

PacNet processes the cheques and wires the money to the criminals.

All the vulnerable people who have fallen for the latest scam have their names recorded on a new ‘suckers list’. The list is then traded around criminals.

As a result, they are quickly bombarded with more scams from criminals all over the world.

A spokesman for TRENDS said they were unable to comment for legal reasons. Asendia admitted it had held a contract with TRENDS but said it had no way of knowing the letters were scams. PacNet denies any wrongdoing and says it has never knowingly processed money generated by scams.