BRITAIN: A pharmacy in Scotland is suffering from a bad case of mistaken identity after it was used as the front for a Nigerian confidence trick.
Unsuspecting victims from around the world are descending on the chemist shop in Thurso, Caithness, believing it to be a bank into which they were duped into paying thousands of pounds.
Each was told they would inherit an oil company in return for an upfront fee to be paid into an account at the Continental Trust Bank, but the bank does not exist and the address given was that of Sutherland's the chemists.
"It is a bona-fide operating pharmacy," Det Supt Gordon Urquhart of Caithness Police said. The pharmacy's manager, Mr Andrew Paterson, said people from as far afield as Norway and New Zealand were calling in to demand their money back.
"We had a Mediterranean couple come in looking for a bank," Mr Paterson told BBC Radio.
"After a while we suggested maybe they should go round to the police. They did seem a little upset about it."
Mr Arlen Hughes, from Wyoming in the US, was told he would inherit $41 million if he paid $57,000 up front.
The Nigerian oil company con and its many variants have been around for some 20 years and are widely known as the 4-1-9 scam after the fraud section of the Nigerian penal code. Thousands of people have been duped into sending money.