fraudsters made 30 million on Dutch

Dutch were scammed out of a total of € 30 million over the past three years, reported the Fraud helpdesk, established in 2011, Thursday. The helpdesk received an impressive 70,000 reports of fraud or attempted fraud. By far the most common form of fraud reported was "loan fraud" where victims are lured into transferring money to someone else's bank account and never get it back.

Examples of such fraud are inheritance fraud and lottery fraud, and the most popular, "loan" fraud, where people transfer money to a potential relationship partner. These added up to €16 million. Another form of fraud reported, the bogus investments, scammed people out of € 6.2 million euro, but the brunt of the reports were about so-called phisingmails. Research showed that about 20 percent of people, about 28,000 reports, fall for those and click on the link. Sometimes it's months later when a malicious program, installed months earlier, plunders people's bank accounts. The helpdesk cited one extreme example where a Noord-Brabant man was scammed out of € 1.5 million through a combination of dating and inheritance fraud.