In a classic instance of a black money scam, also known as the ‘wash wash scam’, a group of men in the city cheated people of a few lakhs after convincing them that pieces of black paper were foreign currency. Seven men have been arrested.
Police said the prime suspect, D. Nanda Kumar (44), who runs a shop in Srinivasa Nagar, Perungalathur, had, a while ago, come across a website that offered easy money with very little investment and contacted the person who posted it.
“Nanda Kumar got in touch with one John Jeffry Maris and flew to Delhi to meet him. Maris, believed to be a Nigerian national, gave Kumar bundles of black notes and a bottle of a chemical solution. He then demonstrated a process whereby a black note was ‘cleaned’ and revealed to be a currency note,” said Joint Commissioner (West), K. Shanmugavel on Wednesday.
He said in a ‘black money scam’, operators convince people they have won large sums of money in an online lottery and that the sum will be shipped to them as black notes to avoid scrutiny by Customs or the Enforcement Directorate.
Victims are then made to buy a chemical, purportedly a cleanser, to retrieve the fake money, which in reality are pieces of paper coated with glue, immersed in an antiseptic liquid. A few original notes are also placed among the bundles to dupe the victim by demonstrating the ‘cleaning’ process.
However, when the victim washes the paper bills with the chemical (which is actually juice or vitamin water), he finds plain paper.
Kumar purchased the black notes and the chemical for Rs. 25 lakh and executed the scam in Chennai for over a month. He, along with S. Aravamudhan (54), Ravi Sathyamoothi (51), D. Sridhar (27), Jahir Husain (51), Jesu Mohan (48) and college student R. Vignesh (24), was nabbed by Avadi police on Tuesday night.
