Nigerian fraud: one more held from Delhi

March 05, 2015 12:00 am | Updated 05:47 am IST - THIRUVANANTHAPURAM:

One more Nigerian national, Festus Ikechukwu, 28, has been arrested and brought to the city by the State Cyber Police in connection with an online fraud case registered here based on a complaint from a woman in Thirumala.

According to T. Shyamlal, Inspector, Cyber Police, Festus was taken into custody from Krishna Park in South Delhi and produced before a court there before he was brought to the city on Wednesday.

With this, six persons, five of them Nigerians, have been arrested in connection with the case, in which the Thirumala-based housewife was duped of Rs. 2.77 lakh.

She was allegedly tricked into paying the money after being contacted via email, offering her ‘a partnership in a cancer specialty hospital that would purportedly be set up in the country with the partnership to entitle her to a fortune’.

Mr. Shyamlal said the investigation team had got information on three accounts from the accused who were arrested earlier, into which cash was deposited. Two of these were Central Bank accounts and one, a State Bank of India account. Festus was identified with the help of CCTV visuals, which allegedly showed him withdrawing money from two SBI ATMs at Sangam Vihar and Krishna Park in December last year. Monitoring of the transaction details of these accounts, and information from the arrested, had helped the arrest of Festus, he said.

The Cyber police are now probing details of 20 other accounts, details of which were elicited from the mobile phone of Festus, to ascertain whether more people were fleeced in similar manner. Efforts are on to trace two more Nigerians, identified as Johnson and Solomon.

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