LONDON: One morning in August last year, Peter Saunders from Edinburgh received a heart-wrenching letter from Namukula Viola of Uganda. She is just 16, with two younger sisters, orphaned when her mother was raped and killed by rebels in fighting in the north of the country.

After a 146-mile walk to the capital city, Kampala, they were taken in by a saintly 82-year-old widow who paid for her to return to school. Now she has won a place at the St Paul’s nursing training school but can’t afford the 385 pound fees. She is praying to God that Peter will send her the money and help her make a new start.

But the reality is that the story is totally fictitious. Namukula Viola does not exist. The St Paul’s school does not exist. The address is a PO box number, where the fraudsters pick up the cheques sent by the benevolent-minded conned into this scam.

Most of us are accustomed to mass-produced spam emails seeking our bank details. We delete them immediately. But these letters, hand-written on school exercise book paper by obviously young hands, use every trick possible to tug on the wallets of victims.

Peter is described by his wife Helen as “an innocent, trusting and unworldly person”. He does not have a heart of stone, and willingly responded to Viola’s appeal. What happened next is a lesson in why whatever charitable instincts you possess you must ignore these letters.

Soon after filling in her admission form and posting it back with the 385 pounds, letters arrived from “Viola” and “Mrs Esther Nambi” (director of the nursing school) thanking him for his kindness.

On the Nov 27 Nambi wrote to say that though Viola was doing well at school, she was troubled by the fact that she and her two younger sisters had nowhere to live. The widow who had taken them in had died and relatives had reclaimed her house, turning Viola and her sisters out. A house had been found, partly purchased by her local church congregation, but they would need to raise an extra 1,450 pounds to secure the property.

“It all sounded very plausible. My husband sent off the money,” says Helen.

But that wasn’t the end of it. A few weeks later, Peter was phoned by “Mrs Christine Nakayenga” (the nursing school bursar), to ask for a further 1,500 pounds to register the purchase of the property, which was a “legal requirement”.

“He sent off this money, though I begged him not to. I felt mounting alarm the situation was out of control. If you wonder how my husband could have fallen for such a scam, I should explain that he is a very trusting person. Once he started to help Viola he felt morally obliged to continue...he was so moved by her plight.”

Peter has sent St Paul’s a total of 3,335 pounds.

Two weekends ago Helen’s heart sank when she saw a letter on a financial advice page of the London-based Guardian from a reader who had been sent a handwritten note from “Florence Naritende”. She also needed 385 pounds for her first-year place at St Paul’s, with the rest of the story strangely identical to that of Viola. Apart from wondering if the letter was genuine, the reader was intrigued as to why it was sent to his artist’s studio address rather than his home.

Since then, the Guardian’s financial section has been inundated with letters from artists targeted by the same scam. Another variation is also doing the rounds this time aimed at Church of England vicars. It appears the fraudsters are buying Who’s Who-style directories and sending out thousands of letters written to target a particular group with liberal and benevolent instincts.

Helen says: “I wondered how Mrs Esther Nambi and Viola could have found my husband’s name and address in the first place. This explains it all. As my husband is an artist and his details appear in a publication called Who’s Who in Art, I suspect this is where they found them.”

To prevent Peter and Helen being targeted again, we have changed their names. Helen wants to warn people of this particularly nasty scam. As she says: “It is moral blackmail and a quite criminal abuse of our charitable instincts.”

At the British High Commission (embassy) in Kampala, Uganda, the consul, John Hamilton, said the Commission has received a steady stream of letters from members of the public asking if St Paul’s Nursing Training School exists. “We have found no trace of a nursing school by that name and tell anyone who contacts us that,” Hamilton says. The Commission can be contacted at Information.Kampala@fco.gov.uk

World Vision, a Christian charity which operates the well-known “sponsor a child” scheme, says it is deeply concerned about the bogus letters from Africa seeking donations. “It’s horrifying that this kind of scam is going on in the name of charity.”

World Vision acts as a sort of clearing house between donor and recipient. The donor never knows the child’s address, and the child is never given the donor’s address.

“Everything takes place with us as the conduit,” says a spokeswoman.

Helen Saunders knows that she will never again see the 3,335 pounds her husband lost to the fraudsters. “What is particularly nasty, is the fact that the scammers have deliberately picked two groups of people most likely to respond with compassion to the misfortune of others. It is a confidence trick of the most horrible kind.”—Dawn/The Guardian News Service