Mumbai: The Bhandup police have arrested a Nigerian national and his Indian wife for allegedly cheating a Bhandup resident into paying them close to ₹14 lakh using a honey trap.
The complainant, Sandeep Singh, received a friend request on Facebook from the female accused, who had set up an account in the name of Mercy John, in October last year. The profile had a picture of a Causasian woman, and she identified herself as a London-based businesswoman while chatting with Mr. Singh.
Soon, Mr. Singh exchanged numbers with her and they started chatting on WhatsApp. The woman then told him that her husband named Valentine was running a herbal seeds import business and had recently lost his supplier, and that Mr. Singh could make a fast buck by supplying the seeds to her husband.
“The woman put Mr. Singh in touch with a man who she claimed was an Indian supplier of herbal seeds, and told him that he could buy seeds from this supplier and sell them to her husband at double the price he had paid, pocketing a 100% profit. Mr. Singh got in touch with the supplier and paid him ₹2.5 lakh through online banking and received a packet of seeds via courier around eight days later,” said Sachin Patil, Deputy Commissioner of Police, Zone VII.
Subsequently, Mr. Singh met Valentine in the Bandra Kurla Complex and handed over the packet to him. He told Mr. Singh that he would need to run some lab tests on the seeds and left. Mr. Singh then received an email that his sample had been approved, after which he placed a bulk order with the supplier and transferred ₹10 lakh to his account. The supplier told him that he would import the seeds from some foreign-based suppliers and pass them on to him.
Meanwhile, he received a call from a woman claiming to be from the Customs department and paid ₹1.23 lakh as consignment charges, after which there was no further contact from the couple, not could he contact them on the numbers they had given him.
“In November, Mr. Singh again received a call from a woman claiming to be from the Customs department, telling him that his consignment of seeds had arrived and that he should pay some further consignment charges and collect the seeds. When he asked for a land line number to call her back on, she refused to give one, and Mr. Singh, who had become suspicious by then, approached us,” said Mr. Patil.
The Bhandup police then obtained CCTV footage of the area where Mr. Singh had met Valentine and retraced his movements to the Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport, where they established that he had come to Mumbai from Delhi.
“With the help of some local informants in Delhi, we traced the two accused posing as Valentine and Mercy John. They were picked up outside a church on Good Friday, after which we brought them to Mumbai and arrested them. We are trying to apprehend the person who posed as the supplier,” said Mr. Patil.
The two accused have been identified as Nagbu Aoraujuka and his wife Niharika Deep Auraujuka. Their laptops have been seized and are being analysed.
