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Warning about student ‘money mules’

Labels: Business

25 February 2013 Last updated at 19:03 ET

By Simon Gompertz Personal finance correspondent, BBC News

Fraud experts are warning that hundreds of thousands of people are in danger of being duped into laundering money for fraudsters.

They are being recruited as unwitting “money mules” who allow their own bank accounts to be used to disguise the proceeds of crime.

The study was carried out by Financial Fraud Action, which tackles fraud on behalf of banks.

It said that students and jobseekers could be especially vulnerable.

Some 19% of students who had been approached had agreed to become money mules.

“It’s a very serious problem,” warns DCI Dave Carter, an investigator from Financial Fraud Action.

“Almost every single criminal transaction that goes on depends on money mules, to turn the money from crime into something the criminals can spend themselves.”

How it works

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It just makes you feel sick. I don’t want it to happen again.”

End Quote Kayleigh Rance job-seeker

The fraudsters contact likely targets by sending out mass emails offering employment, or after sifting through CVs posted by job seekers on employment websites.

Then they offer jobs as “money transfer agents”, “payment processing agents” or “administration assistants” for salaries of hundreds of pounds a week.

It looks like a proper job offer, but the real purpose is to channel cash from criminal activity through a person’s own bank account, making them the fraudster’s money mule.

Kayleigh Rance has been hunting for work for a year. She was taken in and even signed a contract. Then, luckily, she pulled out.

“It just makes you feel a bit sick,” she complains, “I feel like I’ve got to go through all the websites now and take my CV off because I don’t want it to happen again.”

The dirty cash comes from credit card fraud, money stolen from bank accounts and other rip-offs.

Paying it into the money mule’s account disguises where it comes from. The mule transfers it to an account in an overseas bank, controlled by the fraudster. It is classic money laundering.

Some money mules are paid by a straightforward cut of the cash being handled. A typical share would be 8%.

Campaign

The first mules tended to be new entrants to the UK, processing funds generated by crime within their own communities in London and other major cities.

But the power of the internet has allowed the perpetrators to start targeting other groups, including students desperate to earn some extra cash.

Financial Fraud Action commissioned ICM to question 2,000 adults along with separate groups exclusively made up of students, jobseekers and new entrants to the UK.

Around 15% had received the suspect job offers. Overall 6% of those who had been approached accepted the offers, rising to 13% of the unemployed, 19% of students and 20% of new entrants.

Crimestoppers is running a campaign in universities across the UK to warn students not to be fooled into becoming involved, telling them: “Don’t be a mule!”.

‘Colossal risk’

Megan Owen, who is studying criminology, volunteered to help at one recent event in Birmingham City University.

“Lots of students we approached said they’d been affected or their friends had been affected,” she said.

Extrapolating from its survey, Financial Fraud Action concludes that 380,000 people could have become unwitting money mules.

The figure is a stab in the dark, but it is clear that the problem is becoming worse and that few of those who become involved understand the risks they are running.

Their bank accounts could be frozen. If prosecuted, they could be sent to prison for up to 10 years.

“It’s a colossal risk,” warns DCI Carter. “In fact you are taking almost all the risk on behalf of the criminal. That’s why they ask – the money mules are the ones most likely to be caught.”

BBC News – Business

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Italy faces stalemate after election shock

Labels: World

ROME (Reuters) – Italy faced political deadlock on Tuesday after a stunning election that saw the anti-establishment 5-Star Movement of comic Beppe Grillo become the strongest party in the country but left no group with a clear majority in parliament.

“The winner is: Ingovernability” was the headline in Rome newspaper Il Messaggero, reflecting the stalemate the country would have to confront in the next few weeks as sworn enemies would be forced to work together to form a government.

The center-left coalition led by Pier Luigi Bersani won the lower house by around 125,000 votes, where it will have a majority because of a premium given to the largest party or coalition.

Results in the upper house Senate indicated the center-left would end up with about 119 seats, compared with 117 for the center-right. Seats are awarded on a region-by-region basis in the Senate, where a majority of 158 is needed to govern.

Any coalition must have a working majority in both houses in order to pass legislation.

Bersani claimed victory but said it was obvious that Italy was in “a very delicate situation”.

Neither Grillo, a comedian-turned-politician who previously ruled out any alliance with another party, nor Silvio Berlusconi‘s center-right bloc, which threatened to challenge the close tally, showed any immediate willingness to negotiate.

Commentators said all of Grillo’s adversaries had underestimated the appeal of a grassroots movement that called itself a “non-party”, particularly its allure among young Italians who find themselves without jobs and the prospect of a decent future.

The 5-star Movement’s score of 25.5 percent in the lower house was just ahead of the 25.4 percent for Bersani’s Democratic Party, which ran in a coalition with the leftist SEL party, and it won almost 8.7 million votes overall – more than any other single party.

FRUSTRATED GENERATION

“The ‘non-party’ has become the largest party in the country,” said Massimo Giannini, commentator for the Rome newspaper La Repubblica.

World financial markets reacted nervously to the prospect of a government stalemate in the euro zone’s third-largest economy with memories still fresh of the financial crisis that took the 17-member currency bloc to the brink of collapse in 2011.

The euro skidded to an almost seven-week low against the dollar in Asia on fears about the euro zone’s debt crisis. It fell as far as $ 1.3042, its lowest since January 10.

A first indication of investors’ reaction to the results will come later on Tuesday when the Treasury auctions 8.75 billion euros in 6-month bonds.

Italy’s borrowing costs have come down in recent months, helped by the promise of European Central Bank support but the election result confirmed fears of many European countries that it would not produce a government strong enough to implement effective reforms.

Grillo’s surge in the final weeks of the campaign threw the race open, with hundreds of thousands turning up at his rallies to hear him lay into targets ranging from corrupt politicians and bankers to German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

In just three years, his 5-Star Movement, heavily backed by a frustrated generation of young Italians increasingly shut out from permanent full-time jobs, has grown from a marginal group to one of the most talked about political forces in Europe.

“The 5-Star Movement is the real winner of the election,” said SEL leader Nichi Vendola, who said that his coalition would have to deal with Grillo, who mixes fierce attacks on corruption with policies ranging from clean energy to free Internet.

RECESSION

“It’s a classic result. Typically Italian,” said Roberta Federica, a 36-year-old office worker in Rome. “It means the country is not united. It is an expression of a country that does not work. I knew this would happen.”

A long recession and growing disillusionment with mainstream parties fed a bitter public mood that saw more than half of Italian voters back parties that rejected the austerity policies pursued by Prime Minister Mario Monti with the backing of Italy’s European partners.

Monti suffered a major setback. His centrist grouping won only 10.6 percent and two of his key centrist allies, Pier Ferdinando Casini and lower house speaker Gianfranco Fini, both of parliamentarians for decades, were booted out.

“It’s not that surprising if you consider how much delusion there was with politics in its traditional forms,” Monti said.

Berlusconi’s campaign, mixing sweeping tax cut pledges with relentless attacks on Monti and Merkel, echoed many of the themes pushed by Grillo and underlined the increasingly angry mood of the Italian electorate.

Stefano Zamagni, an economics professor at Bologna University said the result showed that a significant share of Italians “are fed up with following the austerity line of Germany and its northern allies”.

“These people voted to stick one up to Merkel and austerity,” he said.

Even if the next government turns away from the tax hikes and spending cuts brought in by Monti, it will struggle to revive an economy that has scarcely grown in two decades.

Monti was widely credited with tightening Italy’s public finances and restoring its international credibility after the scandal-plagued Berlusconi, whom he replaced as the 2011 financial crisis threatened to spin out of control.

But he struggled to pass the kind of structural reforms needed to improve competitiveness and lay the foundations for a return to economic growth, and a weak center-left government may not find it any easier.

(Writing by Philip Pullella; Additional reporting by Barry Moody, Gavin Jones, Catherine Hornby and Naomi O’Leary; Editing by Pravin Char)

World News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Mediterranean diet can ward off heart disease: study

Labels: Health

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – A Mediterranean diet high in olive oil, nuts, fish and fresh fruits and vegetables may help prevent heart disease and strokes, according to a new large study from Spain.

Past research suggested people who eat a Mediterranean-like diet have healthier hearts, but those studies couldn’t rule out that other health or lifestyle differences had made the difference.

For the new trial, researchers randomly assigned study volunteers at risk of heart disease to a Mediterranean or standard low-fat diet for five years, allowing the team to single out the effect of diet, in particular.

“This is good news, because we know how to prevent the main cause of deaths – that is cardiovascular disease – with a good diet,” said Dr. Miguel Angel Martinez-Gonzalez, who worked on the study at the Universidad de Navarra in Pamplona.

He and colleagues from across Spain assigned almost 7,500 older adults with diabetes or other heart risks to one of three groups.

Two groups were instructed to eat a Mediterranean diet – one supplemented with extra-virgin olive oil and the other with nuts, both donated for the study – with help from personalized advice and group meetings. The third study group ate a “control” diet, which emphasized low-fat dairy products, grains and fruits and vegetables.

Over the next five years, 288 study participants had a heart attack or stroke or died of any type of cardiovascular disease.

People on both Mediterranean diets were 28 to 30 percent less likely to develop cardiovascular disease than those on the general low-fat diet, the researchers reported Monday in the New England Journal of Medicine.

The new study is the first randomized trial of any diet pattern to show benefit among people initially without heart disease, said Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian, who studies nutrition and cardiovascular disease at the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston.

NOT DUE TO SINGLE INGREDIENT

It’s the blend of Mediterranean diet components – not one particular ingredient – that promotes heart health, according to Martinez-Gonzalez.

“The quality of fat in the Mediterranean diet is very good,” he told Reuters Health. “This good source of calories is replacing other bad sources of calories. In addition, there is a wide variety of plant foods in the Mediterranean diet,” including legumes and fruits as desserts, Martinez-Gonzalez added.

“I think it’s a combination of what’s eaten and what’s not eaten,” agreed Mozaffarian, who wasn’t involved in the new research.

“Things that are discouraged are refined breads and sweets, sodas and red meats and processed meats,” he told Reuters Health. “The combination of more of the good things and less of the bad things is important.”

Martinez-Gonzalez suggested people seeking to improve their diet start with small changes, such as forgoing meat one or two days per week, cooking with olive oil and drinking red wine with meals rather than hard alcohol.

Replacing a high-carbohydrate or high-saturated fat snack with a handful of nuts is also a helpful change, said Teresa Fung, a nutrition researcher at Simmons College in Boston who also wasn’t on the study team.

“All of these steps are making, at the end of the day, a big difference,” Martinez-Gonzalez said.

Fung pointed out many people in the new trial were already on medications, such as statins and diabetes drugs.

“The way I see it is, even if people are on medication already, diet has substantial additional benefit,” she told Reuters Health.

That’s likely the case for people without heart risks – including high blood pressure or cholesterol – as well, Fung added.

“This is a high-risk group, but I don’t think people should wait until they become high-risk in order to change,” she said.

SOURCE: http://bit.ly/YuyV7v New England Journal of Medicine, online February 25, 2013.

Diseases/Conditions News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Warning about student ‘money mules’