Photo: Nick Pampoukidis/Unsplash
TLDR: This 17-year-old has been accused of opening bank accounts in his own name and selling them to others who used these accounts to operate scams. Victims of the scams believed that they were making investments via legitimate online platforms and were told to deposit their capital in the bank accounts belonging to the teenager. When they subsequently lost their money, police were able to track down the teenager from his account details.
He was charged under the Corruption, Drug Trafficking and Other Serious Crimes (Confiscation of Benefits) Act, presumably for the s44 offence of “assisting another to retain benefits from criminal conduct”.
More thoughts: When someone offers you money simply to use your bank account, you may think it’s the business opportunity of a lifetime. After all, it costs you almost nothing to open or manage a bank account and yet you get a steady passive income from it.
But before you do it, think about why anyone would pay you to use your bank account. Chances are that they cannot legitimately open an account in their own name, or don’t want an account that can be traced back to them. This means that whatever they plan to use the account for is likely to be illegal.
As long as you have reason to know that your account is being used to assist anyone to retain proceeds of illegal activity, you can be charged for the offence mentioned in the report.