Nigerian gangs first operated in India by sending threatening e-mails to demand ransom. E-mails sent to business houses often warned that their establishments would be destroyed if they failed to pay up. The victims were forced to deposit the money in bank accounts which would reach the gang after being transferred online through many bank accounts.
The Nigerian gangs then adopted another ruse by sending e-mails and SMS texts to prospective victims announcing that they had won a lottery. The lucky winners were picked on the basis of a random selection of e-mail IDs or cellphone numbers by using appropriate software.
Once the victim took the bait, the sender of the e-mail would first ask the ‘prospective recipient' to deposit a few lakhs of rupees as tax and processing charges in the bank in order to receive the crores of rupees as benefit. Once the money was deposited, there would be no further response from the sender of the e-mail.
The investigating agencies later realised that these Nigerian gangs had begun operating hundreds of accounts simultaneously and after the victims' money reached a particular account, it would be transferred to a series of accounts and finally reach the fraudster.
In this kind of operation, the Nigerian gangs lured the local youth, offering them employment as ‘agents' for their ‘business'. In the ‘offer' letter, no mention would be made about the nature of the job or other clauses found in a genuine letter of employment. The job would require the ‘employee' to deliver a parcel, usually containing cheap or useless items to the prospective victim, receive payment from the consignee and then deposit the money in a bank. The money would then find its way to the fraudster through an elaborate banking exercise. Yet another method to defraud innocent victims was to make the youth ‘manage the accounts' of the Nigerian gangs' local operations. This involved the responsibility of the local employer i.e., innocent victim, to receive the money in his account from an unknown account and transfer the same to another account as instructed by the head office i.e., Nigerian gangs. The employee would neither know the boss nor the profile of the company he was working for. All transactions would be executed only through e-mails and online transfer of funds. A woman employee of a private firm in the city transferred her employer's Rs. 4.5 crore to a Nigerian fraudster. On realising that she had been part of a crime, she committed suicide, said City Police sources.
In the last four months, the City Police had received 10 such complaints. A source said that a graduate had applied for a passport and had come to the police office recently to request for early police verification stating that he had received a job offer for a salary of Rs 10 lakh per month. But he was not even sure of the identity of his employers!
The Cyber Crime Cell in Coimbatore City has been equipped to track these criminals. Hence recipients of such mails, SMS texts or people, who come to know of such activities, should report these instances to the police immediately.
