In a bid to evade strategies deployed by law enforcement agencies to end their illegal activities, fraudsters, commonly known as ‘Yahoo boys’, who primarily exploit digital cyberspace to defraud unsuspecting members of the public of their hard-earned money, now resort to various shady means, including seeking spiritual protection to hide their identities, Victor Ayeni writes The EFCC officials, acting on a tip-off about some suspected fraudsters residing in an estate in the Lugbe area, invaded their compound and in the process, caused a commotion that woke the 26-year-old, making his heart pound rapidly. Confused and disoriented, Marcel peeked through his curtains, saw an EFCC van parked outside and heard the law enforcement officials moving into his neighbour’s apartment. With a sense of urgency, the Imo State indigene picked up the phone he had been using for over two years to scam unsuspecting people and rushed to the restroom.
“My hands were shaking but my brain was working like a clock. An idea came into my head to wrap my phone in a nylon bag and that’s what I quickly did. A voice in my mind told me to hide the phone in the toilet tank, but another voice told me they would find it and I would be busted.
“I decided to dip the phone in the toilet bowl and shove it in the connecting pipe. That phone is what I used for ‘bombing and grinding’ and if EFCC finds it, I’m done,” Marcel confessed to Saturday PUNCH. In Nigeria, Internet fraudsters, aka Yahoo bo.
