Online scammers profiting from earthquake in Turkey and Syria must be tracked down and locked up

Quake scams

OUT of the tragedy of the earthquake in Syria and Turkey has come the ray of hope provided by honest, generous Brits.

Sun readers raised over £1 million in less than a week to help the survivors.

Around £60 million in total has so far been collected by various UK charities.

Depressingly, the overwhelming desire to help has also proved rich pickings for immoral con-artists.

As we reveal today, online scammers are trying to profit from the misery.

Preying on the kind-hearted, they are using heart-tugging pictures on social media to persuade users to transfer money into criminals’ bank accounts.

Some even encourage donations to PayPal, which hasn’t operated in Turkey for seven years.

Many of their victims will be elderly folk moved by the plight of others.

The callousness is almost beyond imagination.

Decent folk will ask how much lower is it possible to sink?

Cloaked in digital anonymity, internet fraudsters are a curse of the modern age.

We sincerely hope they are tracked down – and locked up.

Labour lacking

SIR Keir Starmer will today make a fresh apology for the vile anti-semitism that infected the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn, and announce it has cleared its backlog of complaints.

It’s taken him long enough.

But the Labour leader deserves credit all the same, and will rightly claim it as a moment of significant progress.

When it comes to a plan for changing Britain for the better, however, Sir Keir has still got much, much more to do.

He likes to moan about 13 wasted years of Tory Government.

But the downside for him is that voters know he has had all that time to come up with some ideas of his own.

So far, they are thin on the ground.

He has yet to make a sensible case for what Labour would do on the economy, strikes, taxes, or the NHS.

And, above all, this arch-Remainer cannot yet be trusted over Brexit.

Yesterday his Shadow Exchequer Secretary revealed how bare is Labour’s inspiration cupboard.

Tackled on her party needing a national policy on council tax rises, Abena Oppong-Asare didn’t have a clue.

Labour needs to come up with answers if it wants to be a credible alternative.

Freeze framed

THERE’S something wonderfully ironic about council workers removing a freezer that’s part of an art installation by Banksy.

Normally, residents must wait weeks for big items to be taken away.

So next time you want your old sofa recycled, leave it up against a wall and get a famous anonymous street artist to paint around it.