Money mule convictions soar among students: ‘I let my parents down. I let everybody down’

“I was sitting there, thinking about everything, how I had let my parents down, how I’d let everybody down.”

The young college student was sitting in the Dublin Circuit Criminal Court, waiting to hear what sentence he was going to get from Judge Martin Nolan. Close beside him on the bench were two other young men, and a young woman, all waiting to hear if they were going to jail. They looked nervous.

All four had pleaded guilty to allowing third parties use their bank accounts in return for the promise of payment – acting as “money mules”. It is a branch of the money laundering industry that has grown in tandem with the growth of online fraud, and convictions in the criminal courts for the offence have mushroomed.

“There are hundreds, hundreds of these cases,” says a barrister, speaking off the record. The criminals who recruit the young people – the “money herders” – usually make contact over social media, sometimes advertising online for people to become involved. “By and large it is students who respond,” the barrister says. “Usually they are promised €200 or €300 and generally they never get it.”

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The case before Judge Nolan involved two victims who had responded to text messages and phone calls received after office hours and purporting to be from their banks. They had followed the instructions they were given, thinking they were making their accounts secure from a suspected attack, but in fact allowing the criminals to clean out their accounts. One lost €5,000; the other €15,000. The banks reimbursed them, the court heard, but for one of the victims in particular, her sense of trust in people was badly shaken.

The stolen money was transferred to the mules’ accounts. All four of the mules had handed over their bank cards to the criminal gang behind the operation, with one card being collected from outside the young person’s school. The stolen money, having been transferred to the mules’ accounts, had been withdrawn from ATMs. The evidence left by the money transfers went as far as the money mules’ accounts and then dried up. This, as Judge Nolan observed, was the whole point. “Any idea who the main instigators are?” he asked the investigating garda. “Unfortunately not,” she replied.

The judge scratched his head as he considered his decision. “You will probably all argue that they won’t offend in the future,” he said, addressing the barristers representing the four mules, but not really inviting them to answer. They all nodded. “And you will argue for no jail time.” Again they nodded.

The case, the judge noted, was at the lower end of the scale, “but the court is seeing too many of these”. The young people, who had their whole lives ahead of them, would get “very little back from their involvement, other than a criminal conviction”. On the other hand, the judge said, the role they played had been vital to allowing the main culprits hide their identities, and the young people had known their accounts were going to be used for unlawful purposes. “So, what to do?”

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He decided on a one-year suspended sentence for each of them and warned them that if they came back before the courts, they were likely to go to jail. The young people nodded at the judge and the court rose.

“I got a message on Snap,” one of the mules later told The Irish Times, when asked how he became involved. “I was looking through my Snap stories and I saw, you know, guys of my age, getting money, so I wrote a message.”

Communicating over Snapchat with someone he didn’t know, the young man agreed to hand over his banking details in return for the promise of €1,000 (most mules are promised substantially less). It was early in the Covid pandemic, he was just starting college, and he was broke. “He said, you can trust me, and I said, okay, fine.” Men came in a taxi to collect his bank card. “They came to the house to collect it, four guys, they were just outside, and they said are you so and so, and I said, yeah, and I gave them my bank card.”

A conviction can affect your ability to get a job in the future, a mortgage, a car loan, or a travel visa

—  Niamh Davenport, head of financial crime with Banking & Payments Federation Ireland

Nothing happened for a while, but then he got a text message to say money would be arriving in his account. The next day “€4,000 or €5,000” landed in it, substantially more than what he’d been told to expect. “I told them, why is there more? They told me there was going to be €1,000. And they said don’t worry about it, and the next day after that, the money was gone.”

He never got paid the money the criminals said they would give him. Soon after the money passed through his account, the bank blocked it. He got scared and upset, and didn’t pursue the criminals for the money they had promised. Then a letter arrived from the bank, asking him to come in and see them. “I didn’t go because I was scared, and I was worried about what was going to happen. So, I didn’t go.”

That was it, for a few months, until one morning, at about 7am, two detectives turned up at his home and arrested him in front of his parents and siblings. He confessed to everything. When the matter finally came to be heard before Judge Nolan last week, the young man found himself alongside three young people he did not know. They were all part of the same case because the money that had gone through their accounts had been stolen from the same two victims.

Asked how he felt about the conviction, the young man said he regretted what he did “big time”. It was embarrassing being arrested in front of his family, he said, and he remained afraid to go near the bank. “I’m scared that if I give my name, then something is going to happen.” The criminals who got him into this situation “prey on people who are desperate for money”.

“If I was going to say something to the people, it is just don’t do it. Look at me now. I can’t go to the bank. I’m scared. My family, obviously they forgive me, but they are disappointed.”

Every day of the week at the Criminal Courts of Justice in Dublin, similar cases are being heard, with the amounts of money involved varying hugely.

Because there has been a significant increase in fraud in recent years, there is an increased need for money laundering, says Niamh Davenport, head of financial crime with Banking & Payments Federation Ireland. The gangs behind the phishing and text scams are international criminals, and the “horrifying” aspect of what is going on is that the money being stolen is often used by the gangs to fund drug and people trafficking operations, and sexual exploitation networks.

The federation has been involved in awareness campaigns to warn people of the seriousness of what they are being asked to do, targeting students in particular. However others, including recently arrived foreign nationals, are also vulnerable to the criminal gangs’ promises of reward.

“There was a problem with young people not being prosecuted and thinking there will be no consequences, but we don’t want to see young people becoming involved and that is why we had [a] public awareness campaign,” says Davenport.

The consequences of a criminal conviction are very serious, she says. “It can affect your ability to get a job in the future, a mortgage, a car loan, or a travel visa.”