Tony John, Port Harcourt
The Economic and Financial Crime Commission (EFCC) has paraded 10 suspects, who claimed to be US soldiers fighting in Afghanistan.
Parading the suspects at the Commission’s Head Office, in Port Harcourt, Rivers State, the South South zonal Coordinator of EFCC, Naghe Obono Itam, said the suspects impersonated US soldiers to defraud American citizens.
He said that the suspects, who were Nigerians, were appealing to US citizens to support them with donations.
According to him, the suspects used i-tunes to extort money from their unsuspecting victims.
“We have noticed that within the last three months, we have had the issue of Yahoo Yahoo boys, who appeared to have resurfaced.
“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.
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“They extort money from them through i-tunes. The kind of 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 in the army and were 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,” he explained.
He called on Nigerians to be wary of those they give their account numbers to, adding that the commission made recovery both in cash and forfeitures of N1,674,891,899 , $552,368.55 and 5,225 euros.