The South South zonal office of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), yesterday, paraded 10 suspects who posed as American soldiers fighting in Afghanistan.

Parading the suspects at the commission’s head office in Port Harcourt, the Zonal Coordinator of EFCC, Naghe Obono Itam, said the suspects impersonated American soldiers fighting in Afghanistan to defraud American citizens.

 

He said: “We have noticed that within the last three months we have the issue of ‘yahoo yahoo boys’ who appear to have resurfaced again. 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.

“They extort money from them through iTunes. The kind of the iTunes is $100. They find it difficult to collect the money from Nigeria but they collect iTunes 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 called on Nigerians to be weary of those they give their account number.

He said that the Commission made recovery both in cash and forfeitures of N1,674,891,899, $552,368.55 and 5,225 euros while it secured 33 convictions.

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