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Raymond Ozoji, Awka
The Anambra State Police Command has arrested a young man who allegedly goes about with multiple names on the internet especially Facebook making false marriage promises to ladies and dispossessing them of their personal information including bank account details with the sole intent to defraud the ladies and other unsuspecting members of the public.
The Anambra state police headquarters through the Police Public Relations Officer SP Haruna Mohammed issued a press statement about another dimension of fraudulent practice by some Internet fraudsters who devised new pattern of dispossesing innocent citizens of their hard earned money deposited at various commercial banks in the country.
Mohammed, who issued the statement in Awka at the weekend, noted that in addition to alerting the public, the state command also strategized on how to stem the tide of the worrisome development in order to nip it in the bud.
The strategy, according to him, has started yielding positive results as recently, the IGP X-Squad attached to the state command arrested a notorious internet fraudster who bears three different names: Eugene Chimeze Ohamadike, Henry Eze, Ifeanyi Obiora whom the release identified as the brain behind a series of dastardly acts on the social media precisely facebook where he poses as a staff member of one of the oil companies in Port-Harcourt and/or a senior Federal Road Safety Corps official.
The Police maintained that the suspect’s soft targets were usually females seeking for male friends and job seekers, while some other victims fell into his trap under the illusion that they had met an opulent young man with whom they would spend their matrimonial lives with.
Others according to the release fell prey because they got his contact through religious leaders believing that the contact is genuine.
The Police said that the suspect, having made friends with oblivious female victims on facebook, proposed to them and thereafter would inform them that due to his tight schedule at his work place, they should assist him open bank accounts using their own profile and thereafter, he collected the ATM cards and pins. The same accounts he has been using to lure desperate job seekers in the country to deposit their hard earned money into.
Meanwhile, the police in Anambra stressed that it was pertinent to state that the suspect was triangulated and traced to his hideout in Enugu State but was lured to Awka where he was subsequently arrested after sustained intelligence with the aid of modern technology.
Intelligence has it that one of his readily available victims based in Awka identified him and narrated her odeal in the hand of the felon.
The suspect however voluntarily confessed to the crime and the following exhibits were recovered from him: one laptop computer, nine ATM cards from different banks with different names bearing Okoye Chinyere, four foreign SIM cards, three SIM cards, 67 pages of computer printouts for suspected victims/targets and one international passport.
The Anambra state police headquarters said that the case was currently under investigation after which the suspect would be charged to court for prosecution.
The command once again reiterated it’s clarion call on the public to be security conscious and refrain from availing their vital information to strangers in order not to fall into the trap of fraudsters and that the police would not relent in its stance in crime detection, crime prevention as well as maintaining a tranquil atmosphere for all and sundry in Anambra state.
