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Scammers in Ghana are posing as white men on Facebook to trick British women into parting with hundreds of thousands of pounds, a new report has claimed. The cyber criminal gangs, known as Sakawa Boys, are said to trick their victims into social media relationships before sharing stories of medical emergencies and personal trauma and convincing them to hand over huge sums of money. Fraudsters caught by police feel little remorse for their actions and even claim the scams as "retributive justice" for the slaves and gold seized from their country by the British Empire, a research article by Dr Suleman Lazarus, a criminologist for the London School of Economics, found.

The piece revealed that British and American women are targeted on Facebook by scammers masquerading as white men in reputable positions including bankers, soldiers and government officials. "A popular saying among Sakawa Boys is that 'they [white women] exploited our ancestors with mirrors and gunpowder; we will reclaim our resources with computers and brains'," Dr Lazarus said.

"These women are often seeking companionship online, and scammers exploit emotional vulnerability," she told The Telegraph.

"A striking feature of my interviews was how offenders framed their scams through the lens of history. Many explicity drew on colonial exploitation, arguing that what they do is a form of 'digital reparations'. This rationalisation allows them to recast fraud as resistance rather than crime."

Ghana was among the main sources of the Atlantic slave trade and was plundered for its large gold reserves after being colonised by the British in 1874.

Now, it has become the 13th worst country in the world for cyber crime - with West Africa as a whole named as a regional hub for "online scam centres" by Interpol earlier this year.

Training centres for aspiring fraudsters have spring up on the continent, reports suggest, with new recruits learning how to carry out scams including romance fraud at the so-called "hustle kingdoms".

Large-scale Interpol raids recovered £73 million, with more than 1,200 scammers arrested across 18 African nations for targeting almost 88,000 people on Friday.

In her article, entitled 'Fraud as Legitimate Retribution for Colonial Injustice: Neutralisation Techniques in Interviews with Police and Online Romance Fraud Offenders', Dr Lazarus recounted her interviews with 13 scammers.

One of the fraudsters said: "Back then, the white colonialists came with promises of trade and progress, but what did they deliver? Chains. Enslavement. Humiliation. But today here we are, smarter... Now we carry the codes, the format, and the skills.

"We are the architects of a new era, an era where we turn the tables and reclaim what was taken by the white people."

Another added: "They took more than just the gold, cocoa and riches of our land. They took our people, bound them and shipped them across oceans. Now, we are bringing back dollars from overseas."