Three Nigerian men were arrested by Cybercrime police in Vadodara, India for duping a woman of over Rs 2.62 lakh.
Police said that the accused, identified as Lezhu John, Gibril Mohammed, and Egboola Ekena, were running a cyber racket and duped hundreds of people across the country.
All three were nabbed from Delhi, the Vadodara police said in a statement on Saturday, December 7, 2024.
A woman, who is in her late 20s, filed a complaint at the Cybercrime police station a few months ago after she realised that she was being cheated.
The complainant told police that she had come in contact with the accused while surfing her Instagram account.
The accused, who used the alais Sohn Yunmin, claimed to be a US chemical engineer and said he was working in a big energy firm in the UK.
He told the woman that he was soon going to be working in Assam and befriended her.
Police said that the complainant became a very close friend of the accused and she even sent him a gift.
In April this year, the accused told the woman that he needed to buy some machinery and his friend, who was supposed to pay for it, didn’t have money in his bank account. He asked her to transfer him Rs 50,000 and she obliged.
After some days, the accused told her that he was coming to Assam as he got a job offer there and his parcel would soon land in India.
After some days, she got a call from a woman called Niharika who asked for Rs 35,500 for the parcel that had US dollars. She transferred the amount but Niharika kept asking for more money by giving various reasons. The complainant ended up transferring Rs 1.69 lakh but she soon realised that she was being duped.
Police tracked down the accused on the basis of the bank account transactions.
“Investigations revealed that the accused used over 500 bank accounts to commit the fraud. Over 900 complaints have been filed across the country in connection with these bank accounts,” said M M Rajput, ACP (Cybercrime), Vadodara.
The accused trio had a lot of photographs of men and women in their mobile phones.
They used these photos to make fake profiles on social media and dupe people.
