WE took a phone call the other day for a flight to Lagos, Nigeria to depart the following day. We immediately were put on our guard when we were given a mobile phone number to respond to.
We contacted the local CID and also ABTA for advice and were given the name and phone number of the CIDofficer at Heathrow who was dealing with the Nigerian credit-card scam.
He advised us to try and get the credit-card number and address of the client, that they could then arrange for a dummy booking and for them to be picked up at the airport when collecting their tickets.
Over the next 3hrs, we made numerous calls to the police and received many enquiries from the clientasking for his locator. The police in the meantimeconfirmed that we were dealing with criminals and that the credit card had been used throughout Europe on similar scams.
You can imagine our astonishment when the police rang back to say they wouldn’t have anybody available to make the arrest tomorrow. I don’t know why we bothered to contact the police with this information on what is a major fraud problem affecting travel agents throughout Europe. Given the opportunity to mak an arrest, they just couldn’t be bothered to act on it. In future if similar requests come into our office we’ll just tell them sorry – find another agent, rather than trying to help the police.
Sally Dixon, manager, Home and Abroad Holidays, Newark, Nottinghamshire