A worldwide con run from post offices around Malaga in Spain has defrauded thousands of victims of what is thought to be more than £70 million (US$122.75 million) a year.
Before it was broken up, the network was run like a multinational company, with bank accounts in 45 countries, according to Spanish police. More than 300 people have been arrested.
Victims were tricked into paying thousands of dollars each for a promised share in anything from a winning Spanish lottery ticket to the secret savings of former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein's family.
Some were even offered a share of money supposedly recovered from the rubble of the World Trade Center in New York.
Typically, a victim received a letter saying that he or she had won a prize worth hundreds of thousands of pounds Sterling in the world-famous El Gordo lottery, which pays out £1.2 billion in prizes every Christmas, or some other Spanish lottery.
Those who replied were told they needed to pay up to £2,000 to have the prize released. Anyone tricked into sending money was then asked to send more.
"The idea was to squeeze as much as possible out of them," said Jose Luis Oliveros, head of Spain's crime squad.
The names and addresses of victims were gathered from the Internet or commercial mailing lists.
The biggest spenders were invited to Spain, put up in expensive hotels and shown chests full of fake US dollar bills.
At its peak the network of fraudsters was posting 18,000 letters a day in post offices in and around Malaga in Andalusia.
About 1,000 people around the world reported falling for the scam last year, each losing an average of £7,000, police said, although they estimate the actual number of victims at about ten times that.
The gang was spending more than £4 million a year on postage, paper and envelopes, and its total costs are estimated at more than £7 million a year.
"No criminal group can have costs above 7 percent to 8 percent of their profits, otherwise it is not a business for them,"Oliveros said.
Police estimate that 40,000 people a year believed the letters, and that one-quarter sent money.
"At the very least, the fraud would have been above the 100 million euro (US$121.68 million) mark," a police spokesman said.
Victims were spread across 45 countries, with the US, Canada, Japan, Australia, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States especially targeted.
FBI officers and US postal service inspectors travelled to Spain to help to oversee the operation.
Spanish police said that they had intercepted 150,000 letters in Malaga province's postal service over nine days.
The 310 people, many of them Nigerian nationals, arrested this week brought to more than 700 the number detained in a series of operations against so-called "Nigerian frauds" in Spain since 2003.
The Malaga scam operated for several years, but police did not give an estimate for the total amount of money obtained.
However, hundreds of thousands of dollars are known to have been moved to bank accounts outside Spain, especially to Lebanon, Hong Kong and Singapore.
"This was one of the most active criminal organizations in the world, which had developed a huge operational capacity," police said.
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