They have millions of online followers, deals with luxury brands and teach your teen the

Fraud is everywhere. It makes up 40 per cent of all criminal activity in the UK, more when you include something called Authorised Push Payment Fraud, which is when a scammer tricks you into sending money to them. I doubt there is a reader of this newspaper who has not directly been scammed or who doesn’t know someone who has been.

Inescapable: Fraud accounts for 40 per cent of all criminal activity in the UK 

In Scam Nation, you can’t trust anyone. 

Not the boss who texts you from an unknown number asking you to place an order for some new equipment; not the new number on your phone claiming to be your bank and telling you your account has been compromised; not the voice at the end of the line saying she’s your wife and could you transfer a few quid for the shopping; not the message checking on a failed delivery of a parcel you didn’t order; and absolutely not your itinerant offspring who has run into a spot of financial bother.

My neighbour recently had a text from her son, who runs a small business, saying he had hit a temporary glitch and for that week only might not be able to meet his payroll. And could she help, temporarily? Of course she could. And that was £6,000 down the drain.

As I started to write this article, an email popped up in my inbox from a distinguished journalist, someone I knew slightly but had not been in contact with for years. And a CBE to boot. 

He wanted to know if I still used Amazon. Then came the follow up: ‘I need help purchasing an H&M e-gift card for a friend’s daughter battling cancer. Today’s her birthday, and I’m trying to make her smile, but I’ve had trouble buying it online. Could you help me buy it on Amazon? I’ll reimburse you. Your help would mean a lot to her.’

Well, to be honest, that was so lame it was almost disappointing. Only one step up from a Nigerian prince who has left me $20 million. They could have tried something a bit more sophisticated, I felt.

So who are these people, these scammers who should make us distrust more or less anyone? Or at least maintain eternal vigilance? Well, they are young; they are all tech-savvy, of course, aided by the revolution in technology that burns along at exhausting speed. 

Above all they are not shadowy figures in a hoodie stuck in their bedroom and glued to a laptop. The new generation of scammers – many still teenagers – stay one step ahead of the investigators and know exactly how to exploit our social and digital frailties. They will have YouTube channels and they show off, whizzing around the capital wearing fraudulently bought kit.

In this timely, disturbing expose, Kaf Okpattah, an investigative reporter with ITN, reveals that he doesn’t just know the victims of these crimes, he knows the scammers. Some used to be his classmates at school.

For a scammer, keen to acquire a new pair of Nike trainers, there is often a deliberate disconnection from values society sees as normal, fuelled by the mindset that life has dealt you a rough hand. You want nice things, and you are going to get them one way or another.

Scammers, says Okpattah, grew up being told about all the great things they can have and achieve in life. If they work hard. But these things slip beyond their reach, because they were born to poorer families, say, and had a rough start in life.

So they determine to use their nous to level the playing field. They are helped by the fact that for a long time the police haven’t known or cared who they are, brushing the responsibility off to the banks to take care of the problem.

A long time ago, when our parents were children, the highest level of criminality that schoolkids engaged in was underage drinking, and occasionally some light shoplifting.

Now e-commerce, universal access to the internet and a better understanding of technology means that young people are adept white-collar and consumer criminals.

Unintelligible: Scammers have their own language in which they communicate with their fellow fraudsters

Their scams are now everyday occurrences. And scammers aren’t just sitting there trying random combinations of numbers. They’re sending them out to real numbers, real inboxes.

Chillingly, says the author, there are readily available guides online, advising scammers where they can buy phone numbers and steal one-time passcodes.

Let’s get an idea of the vocabulary. Be careful if your kids are chatting about these things. The key is the ‘fullz’, the full personal and financial information of a fraud victim, often obtained through hacking or ‘phishing’, where an attacker impersonates a trusted entity to trick a user into revealing their credentials. 

Then you can ‘click’ a retailer to buy something online, using stolen details, which is then delivered to an ‘addy’, the delivery address for an item purchased fraudulently, which has no link to the scammer’s real address or contacts. ‘Squares’ are bank cards, and a ‘mule herder’ is a crook who recruits and manages people to allow stolen money to wash through their bank accounts.

Much of this engaging book is taken up with the author’s pursuit, via fast-food joints and supermarkets, of fraudsters he has spotted online – and understands too, because they are like him. 

Here’s ‘Tankz’, with millions of streams on Spotify and millions of views on YouTube of his video London Scammer, where he raps about using people’s fullz to fund his glamorous lifestyle. And here’s Mayaz boasting to her millions of followers online about the goods she has acquired.

Both are developing links with commercial brands. Which makes you wonder quite what is going on, no?

If you go onto Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat or Amazon, and know where to look, says the author, you will find vast numbers of accounts and ads selling step-by-step guides on how to commit fraud.

This readable, busy little book takes us through all the hazards of modern-day fraud – and there are plenty. Ultimately, I suppose we can only watch out – and watch our phones. Take care.