West African criminals have imitated a major UK bank using the web spoofing technique that has caught several other major brands offguard and looks set to increase.

According to a spokesman from NCIS, the National Criminal Investigation Service, "Web spoofing is going to be a big problem,"

The spoof in this case involved a domain very similar to, and containing the brand of a UK bank, it looked legitimate but had 'the' prefixing the bank brand name.

Brand Intelligence research has shown that most UK banks are still vulnerable to this type of cybersquatting, with most failing to ringfence multiple versions and suffixes of their brand names.

This scam involved is actually one of the most famous, sometimes referred to as the 419 scam, although this is a new online format.

People are offered a share of huge sums of money provided they help move it out of various African nations

NCIS estimates that up to 5 Americans arrive and wait in hotel lobbies in London every day waiting to meet people offering to help them transfer funds as a result of this scam.

The site has now been shut down.