The team comprising of police officers and operatives of the Directorate of State Security Services, DSS, swooped on Ugorji as he arrived the airport to return to his base in Sweden following an alarm raised by Mr Alex Ojinkeya, a Nigerian businessman residing in Italy.
Ugorji had duped Mr Ojinkeya of the whooping sum of €40,000 in the Spring of 2012 (AfroLife detailed investigation of the case was published in the June 2012 edition of the magazine).
Mr Ojinkeya who was also travelling back to Italy after a visit to Nigeria cited Emeka from afar and carefully approached him from behind. On reaching the fraudster he grabbed him and raised the alarm which attracted members of the security forces to the scene.
Ugorji was immediately arrested and taken to the DSS office at the airport where he was subjected to rigorous interrogation. The no-nonsense officers made Ugorji realised that he was not in Europe where he could play hide and seek. The fraudster started singing, admitting that he actually duped Ojinkeya of €40,000.
The baffled officers could not help but wondered how an Igbo man could treat a fellow kinsman the way he had treated Ojinkeya. Upon his confession and admission of the crime, the officers confiscated the two phones which Ugorji was in possession of. They painstakingly went through the phones and discovered that the fraudster operated two bank accounts.
He was handed the phones to log on to the two accounts. The first yielded nothing while the sum of N1,400,000(one million four hundred thousand) was discovered in the second account. Ugorgi was order to transfer the whole sum to Ojinkeya immediately. He complied. A conversion of the entire sum he duped the businessman was made into Nigeria Naira, and Ugorji made to sign an undertaking he would be remitting an agreed sum every month from that day until the sum total is liquidated.
When the incident occurred a decade ago, all efforts to make Ugorji restitute the money failed. Mr Ojinkeya had to travel all the way to Ugorji’s town in eastern Nigeria to seek the intervention the fraudster’s uncle who is a witch doctor and a member of the notorious Okija shrine. Little did Ojinkeya know that scamming runs in the Ugorji family. On the occasion the uncle tried to swindle the businessman from Italy but failed.
