Two Nigerians residing in the UK face sometime in jail as they are under prosecution for duping a lonely heart woman, they met on a dating site and promised marriage into parting with £1.6m(about N479.2M).
Posing at different times as a wealthy engineer, and a divorcee father-of-one,Olusegun Agbaje, 43, and Ife Ojo, 31,(pictured respectively) went by the name of Christian Anderson to win the woman’s affection.
The victim who is in her 40s is from Hillingdon, north west London.
She had met ‘Anderson’ on a dating website in February 2014, and after becoming lovers online he told her that he was having a difficult time working on a project in Benin, Africa, and that he wanted to come home to be with her but first he needed some specialist machinery so he could finish the project.
He asked her for her financial support, a loan to pay import duty for the machinery, and she dutifully paid more than £30,000 into the business account of his supposed personal assistant, a man allegedly called Brandon Platt.
At other times, he asked for several financial assistance, ranging from £25,000 for a police fine to thousands of pounds to free up inheritance money left by his mother, who lived in Cape Town.
He told her that he wanted to use the inheritance money to set up a life with the victim, but that there were fees for freeing up the inheritance money, which included costs for holding it in a vault in Amsterdam and $170,000 to pay for a non-existent ‘anti-terrorist certificate’ so that the money could be deposited at a bank.
By this time, the victim had been convinced that they would live together, and had even been looking for a home for them to buy.
She met with someone claiming to be Anderson’s lawyer, and even travelled to an office in Amsterdam to meet a man calling himself Dr Spencer, who was supposedly responsible for holding the money in a vault.
Between March and December 2014, the victim paid £1.6million into numerous bank accounts, with the money then transferred into various personal accounts, including £35,000 to the bank accounts of Ojo and Agbaje.
The victim doubted the authenticity of Anderson’s stories on numerous occasions but every time she asked for proof he sent false documentation or made up excuses for why he could not send her evidence.
In January of this year, the woman reported the crime to Metropolitan Police’s specialist cyber crime and fraud detectives, FALCON, which carried out a financial investigation.
They identified Agbaje as one of the recipients of the victim’s money and went his home address where they found him with Ojo.
Both men were arrested and their homes searched. At Ojo’s home, they found a laptop containing records of the victim’s conversation with Anderson, a memento book seemingly sent to Anderson by another victim and a copy of the book The Game.
Detectives are continuing to seek out other members of the gang and try to identify any other victims.
