“Greedy people fall for our trap” – Fraudster

Author(s): Patience Ogbo
For many years now there have been numerous cases of fraud in the country, and while victims commonly claim that they do not voluntarily cooperate with the fraudsters but that the fraudsters hypnotise them, the fraudsters on the other hand claim that the victims voluntarily cooperate with them out of greed and the desire for easy money. The case of Chidi Nwazor and Mrs Oyekanmi is an example of this situation.
Mr Nwazor was arrested in May by the police in Oyo State for allegedly abducting and defrauding Mrs Oyekanmi of N100,000. He said he was able to defraud the woman because she wanted to get quick wealth.
“I and some friends normally used a car to pick up people at bus-stops,” he said. “We were four in the gang and I was the driver. Two of the others would sit in the car with me alongside a victim. When the victim gets into the car and settles down, I would address one of my gang members, ‘Mr. Man, those dollars you have in your bag in the booth are a lot, and I have to report you to the police.’ Then I would get out of the car, drag a bag full of paper from the booth, and ask everyone in the car to get out so I can go to report at the police station.
“The gang member claiming to own the bag would plead with me not to take the bag to the police and that he would allow me to keep some of the money. We would engage in this drama to get the attention of the victim. If the victim was greedy, he would ask to share in the money and would say I should not report to the police. We would then agree to share the money. Then the ‘owner’ of the bag would say that he stole the money from his boss, that his boss had cast a spell on the money, and that the spell would kill anyone who spent it.
“He would also say the only way to neutralise the spell was to go to a spiritualist to ‘cleanse’ the money. Here, I would volunteer to take everyone to the spiritualist. Our fourth man in the gang was the fake spiritualist. He would ask for a huge sum as fee for breaking the spell, and while we would pretend to bring our part of the fee, the victim would bring his so as to get a larger amount of money as we promised. But after he brings whatever he could get, our spiritualist would collect the money and swear us all to secrecy. Then we would give the victim fake dollar notes, and by the time the victim realises, we would have escaped. Then we would go to another part of town or another state. So you see, greed makes people fall into our trap; we do not hypnotise them.”
Mrs Oyekanmi said she was hypnotised. “I boarded the car (in Ibadan) from Sango to Mokola,” she said. “But the driver drove me to a destination that was unknown to me. I was not myself in the vehicle. There were also two men in the car who were arguing about dollar notes being in the booth. Next thing I know is that they took me to a fake prophet and collected my N100,000. After we returned to the car, my phone rang and it was my husband on the phone. While I spoke to him, I suddenly regained my senses. I was still in the car when I saw a police van and I raised the alarm that I had been kidnapped. That was how the police arrested the men.”
Speaking on if fraud cases are a result of hypnosis or greed on the part of victims, Dr Femi Akinfala, a psychologist and lecturer at University of Lagos, said: “Hypnosis happens. People do get hypnotised, though this cannot be scientifically explained. But most cases are a result of greed on the part of the victims.”