Okenyi Kenechi
The Economic and Financial Crime Commission EFCC has paraded 10 persons suspected to be fraudsters for impersonating American soldiers fighting in Afghanistan.
The suspects were paraded at the commission’s zonal head office in Port Harcourt on Thursday.
Nnaghe Obono Itam, the zonal head of operations of the commission said the suspects impersonated American soldiers fighting in Afghanistan to defraud American citizens.
Itam said the suspects used American tunes to extort money from their victims and warned the public against releasing their account numbers to persons.
According to him “We have noticed that within the last three months, we have the issue of yahoo yahoo boys who appeared to have resurfaced again.
“I am glad to say that with the partnership of the Federal SARS we were able to apprehend some of them”
“The most interesting aspect of it is that we still find people that fall prey to this scam.
“We have Nigerians who pretended that they are American Soldiers that came from Afghanistan and were talking to the Americans as if they are Americans soliciting for fund”
“They extorted money from them through I-tunes. The kind of the I-tunes is $100. They find it difficult to collect the money from Nigeria but they collect I-tunes from them and dispose it online in dollars”
“We have four of them in our custody. We still have others who pretended to be American soldiers working and talking to their victims that there were lots of mineral deposits such as gold.
“They contact people online in China asking them to come and buy the mineral deposits.
“In Nigerian they collect N5, 000 each from the unsuspecting public, which they receive from banks from Nigeria.”
Recall that the commission declared war on yahoo boys earlier in the week.
However, Itam said that the Commission made recovery of cash and forfeitures to the tune of N1,674,891,899 , $552,368.55 and 5,225 euros while it secured 33 convictions.
