Criminal gangs from West Africa have infiltrated banks in the UK and elsewhere, the Financial Times newspaper has reported. Gang members are taking jobs in telephone call centres where they able to use account information to defraud bank customers, the newspaper said.

The British police are becoming frustrated at banks' failure to tackle the problem, and have warned that banks could be held criminally liable if they do not act.

Most people in Britain now carry out many bank transactions over the phone.

Call centre risk

Using secure passwords to identifiy their customers, the banks then carry out their instructions.

Most of the phone calls are not dealt with by the banks themselves, but by giant call centres, where large numbers of low-paid staff answer the phones.

This has presented the mostly Nigerian gangs with the chance to place their own people in the call centres and to gain access to customer accounts.

Details are fed to accomplices, who systematically drain funds from their unfortunate victims.

Warning

According to the Financial Times, the British police have become frustrated at what they see as the banks' reluctance to admit just how serious the situation has become.

"We accept that reputation is everything for these banks, but they seem to be anything with respect to these emerging trends that West African criminals are using to infiltrate them," Duncan McKelvie, who heads the UK National Criminal Intelligence Service's team dealing with West Africa, is quoted as saying.

Police are saying that in the long run they could themselves be held liable under the new Proceeds of Crime Act in the UK which places the onus on the banks to report these kinds of crimes.

Just how much has been stolen by such fraud is not clear.

But the paper says that US citizens lose move than $100m (?63.4m) a year to Nigerian fraud.