Ilze Kalve/Latvijas Avize
A book by well-known BBC investigative journalist Nick Stapleton, How to Beat Scammers, has been published in the United Kingdom. It explains in detail how various scam schemes work, how to recognise them, and how to avoid them. Latvia is specifically mentioned both in the book and in several of Stapleton’s articles in the British media.
The mule transfers the victim’s money to another mule account, who takes their share. This second mule sends the money to a third account in the UK. All have been with different British banks. Finally, the third mule sends the money internationally to a bank in Latvia. That mule sends it to Thailand. The Thai mule finally sends the victim’s cash back to an account in India, and it makes its way to the scammers.
Latvia is usually not among the countries favoured by fraudsters, and upon contacting the author of the book, it was clarified that Latvia was mentioned only as an example.
Nick Stapleton; “The most common third countries that I see, would be Baltic States, countries like Estonia, Latvia, that’s fairly common, I would say. But I dont think there is necessarily any particular reason for that beyond where the scammers contacts are. For example, if there is a group of scammers operating phone scams out of India which is very common, India has a quite big problem with phone call scams for various quite interesing reasons. It is quite common for them to have contacts in Europe because of the fact that there is a lot of South Asian diaspora live all over Europe. So they might have relatives who live in Riga. Or they might have a family who live in Tallinn. Or they might have some friends who live in Berlin. So the mule accounts will end up being in those countries because of the fact that just their contacts are there. So I think if you look at the different parts of the world the mule accounts will come from different places.”
There are no statistics in Latvia that would confirm or refute the involvement of people of specific nationalities in money mule activity.
However, publicly available data from the Office of Citizenship and Migration Affairs for 2025, titled “Distribution of Latvia’s population by ethnicity and nationality,” shows that currently 4,773 Indians reside in Latvia, many of whom have likely arrived to study.
Money mule cases are not listed separately in statistics, but it is known that
in 2022, 395 criminal proceedings were initiated for money laundering, while in 2023 the number had decreased to 236, and last year to 183. Around 100 cases reach the courts each year.
Constitutional Court judge Juris Juriss believes that Latvia is tackling money laundering quite successfully, and the number of proceedings reflects the good work of law enforcement agencies rather than a worsening money laundering problem: “Sometimes the injustice lies in the fact that the more effective you are — the more cases you detect and identify — the more people become aware of these identified cases. On the other hand, if you are completely ineffective, there are no such cases, and then there is this hidden nature that everyone talks about, but there’s no way to support it with any actual data.”
Meanwhile, in the United Kingdom, data from the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) shows that in 2022, a total of 194,084 mule accounts were closed. However, only 37% of these cases were reported to the National Fraud Database (NFD . It is not known whether any of these cases have reached court.
In both the United Kingdom and Latvia, a significant proportion of money mules are young people.
Juris Juriss: “Most of them are students or young people of student age — a time when studies are still relevant. For them, €200 might not seem like a huge amount, but at the same time, by transferring €3,000, €4,000 or €5,000, they receive those €200. Easy money! And they think — nothing terribly bad can happen, it’s not like it’s millions!”
The penalties can vary, but for example, for transferring the mentioned €2,000, a prison sentence of up to four years may be imposed. But that’s not all.
Juris Juriss: “What comes as a surprise to many is that they are held liable for the entire amount that was laundered — the full sum that was transferred. So in the end, such a criminal act doesn’t pay off at all!”
Fraud in the UK is one of the most common types of crime, with an estimated 3.9 million fraud cases last year alone in England and Wales.
Nick Stapleton:
“Imagine the manhours, imagine the paperwork that is involved in doing that simple fraud investigation. Its enourmous.
And that’s why so little International crossborder fraud like this is solved. Its because the people who have the skills to do that kind of investigation are dedicated to investigating hundreds of milions of euros worth of fraud. They dont look at single cases like one person who maybe lost 5000 euros, 6000 euros, 10 000 euros. They will look at some massive organized crime group who were doing hundreds of millions. So the expectation of that person who was scammed is – or of that person who’s money was stolen – is, of course, that the police are gonna do everything to get their money back because to that individual that’s probably a life changing amount of money. But the reality of the situation, unfortunatelu, is simply that the work involved tracking that money down is gonna mean that is highly unlikely to happen.”
The problem with investigating various cybercrimes is global, as not all countries are able or willing to cooperate.
Juris Juriss: “Russia, while conducting military operations in the sovereign territories of Ukraine, is engaging in resource plundering. These plundered resources are being sold, including in European Union countries, from where they flow back to Russia. Latvia, as one of the many countries, is able to intercept these funds. When it comes to the initial crime, we have no way of asking the Ukrainians to help us identify who specifically plundered these resources in the occupied territories of Donbas. Or, for example, to ask Vladimir Putin, this criminal, to initiate a process against his own people and hand them over for prosecution.”
However, returning to the topic of Latvia as a possible transit country for money laundering – while in 2018 Latvia’s financial sector was criticised for serving non-residents and for money laundering, particularly in relation to Russia and former USSR countries, the situation has changed drastically since 2020, thanks to improvements in financial supervision. It should also be noted that Latvia has never been included in the United Kingdom’s list of high-risk countries.
