A UK-based scammer who preyed on nearly 700 women and conned nine of them out of £20,000 (about $27,000), has been sent to prison.
London resident Osagie Aigbonohan, 41, pleaded guilty to charges of fraud and money laundering, including scamming £9500 out of one victim in the course of a fake 10-month online relationship.
According to the UK National Crime Agency (NCA), Aigbonohan spun a hard-luck story about how he’d run short of money after paying for the funerals of a group of people who died in tragic industrial accident.
He needed the money for drilling equipment he was hiring for a business venture overseas…
…but it was all a pack of lies.
Fabricated stories
As Dominic Mugan, a manager at the NCA, explains:
Aigbonohan had no regard for these women. He went to great lengths to gain their trust, fabricating stories to exploit them out of thousands.
This is a typical pattern of romance fraudsters: they work to build rapport before making such requests. Romance fraud is a crime that affects victims emotionally and financially, and in some cases impacts their families.
We want to encourage all those who think they’ve been a victim of romance fraud to not feel embarrassed or ashamed but rather report it.
Remember that romance scammers work with empathy and emotion as their tools-in-trade – they generally don’t rely on malware, spyware or booby-trapped email attachments to access their victims’ bank accounts.
In other words, traditional…
