An African national and his Indian wife were arrested for allegedly duping several people, including a woman social worker, in the name of customs clearance for gifts received from them, police said Wednesday.
The cyber cell of the Delhi police arrested Ifeanyi Joachin Nwafor and his wife from Dabri area on Monday and seized cash worth Rs. 6.69 lakh along with 12 mobile phones and two laptops, they said.
According to a complaint lodged by the social worker, a UK-based man named George Moor added her on social networking site Facebook a few months ago. He requested her to accept a few gifts for the poor people in India.
A few days later, the complainant said, she received a call from an unknown woman, who claimed to be a customs officer in Mumbai, and said that a parcel had been received from the UK for clearance and she would have to pay a sum of Rs. 26,000 as customs duty.
On July 10, the complainant deposited that amount in the bank account provided by that unknown woman.
However, the woman had told the complainant that the parcel contained valuable items so she would have to pay Income Tax, and on the next day, she deposited Rs. 95,600, the complainant said.
After receiving several calls for the money, the woman reported the matter to the police and filed a complaint, the police said.
After analysing the mobile numbers, the police noticed that the accused persons had visited Assam last December, and they took out a list of passengers of all flights from New Delhi to Dimapur and from Guwahati to New Delhi.
The police also obtained the details of bank accounts wherein the money had been deposited.
The police also got the details of those ATMs from where the accused persons used to withdraw the amount and analysed the footage of CCTV cameras installed in the area, the police said.
"During interrogation, it was found that Nwafor is from Nigeria and in 2009, he had come to India on a business visa. In 2012, he came in contact with the woman (co-accused) through Facebook, who is from Assam, and later they started living together in Delhi. They got married later in the country," DCP (Dwarka) Anto Alphonse said.
"Nwafor has made several fake Facebook accounts and made friends through them. The duo used to approach people through social media. After taking them into confidence, he used to tell his Facebook friends about sending precious gifts for them," he said.
"Later, his wife called those victims and introduced herself as a customs officer and used to convince them to deposit money into a particular bank account. When the money was deposited, they withdrew it within hours," the DCP added.
