The Market police here arrested a Nigeria national, a garment businessman in Mumbai for 20 years, for matrimonial and ‘black dollar’ fraud.
Alex Mark Odudu, 44, of Lagos, Nigeria, the police said, along with his friends in the country, took to committing cyber frauds through matrimonial websites for easy money. He was booked last year for a case involving Ayurvedic oil in Maharashtra and served jail for seven months.
In the present case, the police said, the accused targeted profiles of unmarried women on matrimonial websites, introduced himself as Adi Javesh, a surgeon in Houston, USA.
With a cooked-up story that his accounts were frozen following war in Syria, and that he’d take wedding leave to come to India, he extracted huge money from the aggrieved woman. Trusting him on the pretext of marriage, the woman transferred him about ₹26.43 lakh.
The accused met the woman at her residence at Ghasmandi and handed over her bag containing fake blackened currency bundles kept under a digital locker as sent by her fiancé. The woman sent more money believing the story.
The police, arresting Odudu, detected 12 cases of related violations at Madhapur, Cyberabad cyber crime, Gachibowli, Alwal, Sangareddy and Warangal, totalling a fraud amount of about ₹84.54 lakh.