A 41-year-old Nigerian national was arrested Monday for allegedly duping a civil engineer of Rs 1.24 crore by faking as an executive of a pharmaceutical company and luring the victim to place an order for an ayurvedic liquid worth the fraud amount, said officials from Vadodara city cyber crime police station.
A probe into the matter was launched based on a police complaint by the Vadodara-based victim, said officials.
The accused, Gabriel Oyeka (41), was arrested from Maharashtra’s Kalyan area, based on technical surveillance and human intelligence used by the Cyber Crime Police.
According to the complaint, Oyeka had posed as an executive of a pharmaceutical company and approached the victim — who is a civil engineer working in a private company — with a dealership offer for procuring and supplying an ayurvedic liquid.
The accused allegedly also provided the victim with details of the “agency” from where he could procure the liquid for further sale, according to the complainant.
Assistant Commissioner of Police, Cyber Crime, MM Rajput said, “The victim is a civil engineer in a private company and he received an email offering business partnership to procure an ayurvedic chemical and start a dealership… The email had landed in the victim’s Spam folder but after reading the offer of a 50-50% sharing of profit, he was lured into the trap…”
Rajput added that the accused initially made the victim purchase 20 litres of the liquid but when the order did not arrive despite the payment, the accused told the victim that if he purchased 50 litres of the chemical, he would receive an advance payment for 130 litres.
“Accordingly, he transferred Rs 1.24 crore into the account of the ‘supplying’ agency, which had been recommended by the accused but neither did he receive the liquid nor the advance payment for the same… He approached the cyber crime police station on realising that he had been duped,” Rajput said.
Rajput added that a team of police officers of the Vadodara cyber crime remained stationed in Mumbai for three days and chased the accused for over 200 km as he constantly changed his location, before nabbing him in Kalyan. According to the police, the accused has previously been booked in Mumbai for offences under the Passport Act and Foreigners Act.
