Pune: Three persons including a journalist from Tamil Nadu were arrested by the Cyber Crime Cell of Pune Police Crime Branch, for alleged involvement in fraud cases in which two Nigerians were arrested in October.
The arrests were made in the cheating case registered by a Chinchwad-based businessman who was ‘honeytrapped’ and paid Rs 1.04 crore in a herbal oil trade deal with a fictitious company in the UK.
The Nigerians contacted the businessman on Facebook in June. The friend request sent to the businessman’s Facebook account appeared to be from a Nigerian ‘woman’. She claimed to represent an UK-based company which dealt in herbal oil. She asked the businessman to supply herbal oil to the company for a lucrative profit and transfer money to various accounts.
Police arrested Amara Obiasogu alias Frank Age alias Robert Spiff (30) and Ekene Unachukwu Age (30), both Nigerian nationals from Panvel. The three arrested accomplices are Ashish Moiuddin Ashique alias Rajesh Babu Prabhakaran (48), a garments businessman from Tellicherry in Kerala, Rejy PR alias Kiran Surya Unnikrishnan (36), a trader in Ernakulam in Kerala, and reporter Shahul Ahmadulla Hamid alias Ravikumar Ramkumar (32) from Velacherry, Adyar in Chennai.
Fraud account modus operandi
“They opened bank accounts in their original names as well as aliases. We have come across 24 bank accounts and seized 45 chequebooks, 17 passbooks, 37 debit cards, nine mobile phones, PAN cards and voter identity cards from them. We have frozen Rs 22.1 lakh in bank accounts and recovered Rs 13.4 lakh cash from them,” said DCP (Cyber Crime Cell) Sudhir Hiremath.
The police said a man called Palani helped them get bogus PAN and voter cards in Chennai to open bank accounts.
The investigating team included ACP Milind Patil, Police Inspectors Radhika Phadke, Gajanan Pawar, PSI Praveen Swami, and policemen Ajit Kurhe, Rajkumar Jaba, Deepak Bhosale, Nitesh Shelar, Atul Lokhande, Shahrukh Shaikh, Mitesh Bachchewar, Deepak Mane and Santosh Jadhav.
