Kolkata: Four persons including three African youth were arrested by the cyber crime wing of the Bidhannagar City Police from Bangalore for allegedly cheating a 62-year-old man over Rs 18 lakhs.
The accused are Steve Gomes (33) and Kachi Aguguo (29) of Maragonda Nahalli at K.R.Puram and Jhonson Uhunamoure (34) of T.C Paliya at K. R. Puram and his wife Sanchita Dey (30) alias Vinita.
While Steve is originally from Guinea-Bissau, Kachi is from Nigeria and Jhonson is from Ghana. Bhaskar Ghosh of Rajarhat Road in Baguiati lodged a complaint of cheating with the cyber crime police station on May 19.
On April 6 he accepted a friend request from one Anne Elizabeth, introducing herself as an US General on Facebook, who gave him a proposal of business of supplying herbal seeds to the US from India for manufacturing life saving medicine.
Anne also connected Mr Ghosh with Vinita, the seed supplier, whom he paid Rs 19,500 through a cheque for one packet of seeds. Getting the packet through courier Mr Ghosh flew to Bangalore on April 25 to meet a US medicine company’s delegate to show him the seed sample he bought from Vinita.
After the meeting, the delegate, one of the accused, bought a seed as sample from Mr Ghosh and paid him US $100 as cost to take it for examination. Optimistic about the business Mr Ghosh bought 100 packets of seeds from Vinita for Rs 18,32,500 as he was told the US company delegate would visit his residence to buy them for Rs 81,000 per packet. But none visited him.
After the arrest of all accused on June 4 afternoon, they were brought to Kolkata on a five-day transit remand. A laptop, two passbooks and two ATM cards, Steve’s passport were seized.
