The Pune City Police have arrested three Nigerian nationals in Delhi for allegedly defrauding and extorting Rs 3.98 crore (N219,067,155.42) from a 60-year-old woman in Pune.

According to IndianTimes, the accused, Jango Nicolas (29), Monday Okeke (26) and Paulinus Mbanugo (29), currently reside in Nilothi Extension, New Delhi.

The woman, who is the complainant in this case, works in a very senior position in a private company.

Last year, she came in contact with a person on Facebook who claimed to be from a foreign country.

This person was an online fraudster but posed as someone in a prominent position by pretending to have assistants and account managers, police said.

Over the next few months, the complainant and the fraudster communicated frequently, exchanged phone numbers and started conversing on WhatsApp, police said.

Sometime later, it was the complainant’s birthday and the fraudster told her he had sent her a high-end iPhone as a gift, police said.

From this point on, large sums of money were taken from the complainant on the pretext of customs clearance at Delhi Airport and other false reasons, police said.

The fraudster even claimed he had been arrested after reaching India and demanded money to arrange his release and for medical treatment, police said.

Deputy Commissioner of Police (Cyber Crime and Economic Offences) Bhagyashree Navtake said,

In this case, the online criminals initially started taking money on the pretext of sending gifts like iPhone, jewellery and foreign currency and for various false reasons like customs clearance and other formalities for these gifts. The complainant was promised that she would be compensated for the money she was giving… She had made transfers of funds up to Rs 1 crore for these gifts.

However, what started as a gift fraud turned into online extortion. The suspects started threatening her with various legal actions. She was told that there were illegalities involved in the items she had paid for and she would face action from government agencies. She transferred even more money under these threats.

Senior Police Inspector D S Hake said the complainant ended up transferring Rs 3,98,75,500 to online fraudsters in as many as 207 transactions from two bank accounts.

The money was transferred to 67 accounts of 25 banks between September 2020 and March 2021.

Justin Nwosu

Justin Nwosu is the founder and publisher of Flavision. His core interest is in writing unbiased news about Nigeria in particular and Africa in general. He’s a strong adherent of investigative journalism, with a bent on exposing corruption, abuse of power and societal ills.