Nigerian lottery fraud ring busted by Spanish police The network then broke off all contact with the victim. Police seized "800 Nigerian letters ready for posting, 700 envelopes, lists of possible victims" in their search, along with 100 photos destined for passport forgery. At the time of the arrests in a building in Torrejon de Ardoz, some "tried to flee through the window after flushing a large quantity of drugs down the toilet," the police said, adding the network also trafficked narcotics. The fraud is only the latest of its kind to hit Spain and other countries in recent years. In January 2012, Indian police arrested six Nigerian nationals on suspicion of defrauding hundreds through text message and spam email scams with similar lottery claims. In March 2009, Spanish police arrested 23 people, most of them Nigerians, on suspicion of running an email and letter scam that duped residents in the United States and Europe into believing they were left an inheritance. One year earlier Spanish police arrested 51 people suspected of running a lottery scam that netted around 40 million euros.