The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) on Thursday paraded 10 persons suspected to be yahoo boys for impersonating American soldiers fighting in Afghanistan.
The suspects were paraded at the commission’s head office in Port Harcourt, the Rivers State capital.
Head of operation Nnaghe Obono Itam said the suspects impersonated American soldiers fighting in Afghanistan to defraud American citizens.
Itam said the suspects used American tunes to extort money from their victims and warned the public against releasing their account numbers to persons.
He said: “We have noticed that within the last three months, we have the issue of yahoo yahoo boys who appeared 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 extorted money from them through I-tunes. The kind of the I-tunes is $100. They find it difficult to collect the money from Nigeria but they collect I-tunes 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 and 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 said that the Commission made recovery of cash and forfeitures to the tune of N1,674,891,899 , $552,368.55 and 5,225 euros while it secured 33 convictions in the year ending.