A 26-year-old fraudster, Samuel Boadu, who pretended to be a prophet and defrauded his victims of huge sums of money, has been jailed.
He was jailed for 16 months for false pretense.
Speaking to Crime Check Foundation’s Ibrahim Oppong Kwarteng on the Foundation’s flagship programme, ‘Time With The Prisoner’, Mr Boadu said he dropped out of school in order to chase “quick money” even after his mother’s efforts to give him the best of education.
He said he ventured into cyber fraud, which was introduced to him by his classmates who also dropped out of school. Desperate as he was, he said he gained experience in the act and developed new ways to easily dupe his victims.
The young man indicated he moved from one town to the other styling himself as a pastor and with the information he gathered about susceptible residents he is able to turn that into a prophecy about them and dupe them.
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“What I do is that I get someone who is also a criminal from a town to fetch information about the suspected victims for me so that I can use it as a prophecy about them. That way it is very easy to defraud them. With this modus operandi I was successful in duping all of the four victims, most of them women, of thousands of Ghana cedis,” he narrated.
He said his criminal act came to an end when, he, with another fraudster disguised themselves as a Chief’s task force to defraud one woman who did not give in easily to their scheme to outwit her.
“She was on her site supervising her building project and we demanded that she provides her building permit but she was unyielding. The genuine Chief’s taskforce, numbering eight then came around and rounded us up for the police,” he said.
The inmate said he was put before a court and was fined One Thousand Five Hundred Ghana cedis. Though he said he had the money to pay, his mother refused to help him withdraw the money resulting in his imprisonment.