Ten Nigerians Arrested In India For Internet Fraud

Ten Nigerian nationals have been arrested from a house in west Delhi’s Mohan Garden in India from where they had allegedly been befriending Indians on social media and swindling them, police said on Wednesday.

The deputy commissioner of police, Dwarka district, Anto Alphonse, said the arrested Nigerians, aged between 26 and 28, could not produce visas and passports, prompting the police to also book them under The Foreigners Act.

Hindustan Times reported that the police were on the trail of the group since June 26 when a man from Nawada in west Delhi approached the Bindapur police station with a complaint of being cheated of Rs 45,500 by a woman with whom he had been interacting online.

“Early this year, the victim had received messages from a foreign number. The person on the other end introduced herself as a foreign woman who was to visit India soon. She made queries about her visit to India,” said the DCP.

He received a phone call once again from the same woman on April 2 when the woman informed him that she had just landed at the Mumbai airport and was headed to Delhi next.

“About an hour later, the victim received a call from an Indian number. The caller said the woman had brought more foreign currency than she was allowed and had no Indian rupees and that she would have to pay a penalty of Rs. 45,500,” the DCP said.

The man agreed to bail her out by depositing the money in a bank account number provided by the caller. The victim approached the police weeks after that incident, when he realised that he had been duped.

“We had the contact numbers from which the man had received phone calls. We focused on the Indian number and the phone in which it was being used and traced its location to a house in Mohan Garden,” said the DCP.

On Monday, police raided the house to find 10 Nigerian men inside. “Most of them were busy on laptops and computers. We checked these devices to find they had cheated many more people,” the DCP said.

A total of 48 mobile phones and six laptops have been recovered from the suspects.