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Frankfurt postman arrested for hoarding truckloads of letters

A Scottish postman working in Frankfurt has been arrested after he was discovered to have hoarded an estimated 20,000 letters at his parents' house where he lived, police said on Tuesday.

Published: 9 September 2008 16:20 CEST

Frankfurt postman arrested for hoarding truckloads of letters

Photo: DPA

The 23-year-old told police that for the past year he had hidden and thrown out the letters instead of delivering them because he was overwhelmed with work while taking night courses to earn his high school diploma equivalency.

A neighbour saw the man tossing letters into a bin and alerted police on Monday. The authorities searched his parents’ home and found letters ferreted away in closets, a bedframe and closets. There were so many letters that police had to use two small trucks to transport them all.

The man, who worked for a private postal company, will likely be charged with misappropriation of postal items.

German police swoop on gang of foreign dating scammers

The Black Axe gang was involved internationally in “multiple areas of criminal activity”, with a focus in Germany on romance scams and money-laundering, Bavarian police said in a statement.

The dating trick was a “modern form of marriage fraud”, police said.

“Using false identities, the fraudsters for example signalled their intention to marry and in the course of further contact repeatedly demand money under various pretexts,” police said.

The money was subsequently transferred to Black Axe in Nigeria “via financial agents”, authorities said.

In the process, the gang used a “commodity-based money laundering” scheme where products, often with a seeming “charitable purpose” were bought and delivered to Nigeria.

Some 450 cases of romance scamming had been reported in the region of Bavaria in 2023 alone, with the damages rising to 5.3 million euros ($5.7 million), police said.

The suspects, who all held Nigerian citizenship and were aged between 29 and 53, were arrested in nationwide raids on Tuesday.

Law enforcement swooped on 19 properties, including both homes and asylum shelters, police said.

The Black Axe gang had “strict hierarchical structures under leadership in Nigeria” operating different territorial units, police said.

The group had a “significant influence” on politics and public administrations, in particular in Nigeria.

Globally, the gang’s main areas of operation were “human-trafficking, fraud, money-laundering, prostitution and drug-trafficking”.

Black Axe operated under the cover of the Neo Black Movement of Africa, an ostensibly charitable organisation used as “camouflage” for the gang’s structures.

The action against Black Axe was the first of its kind in Germany, police said.

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