The Holy Writ tells us that those who want to get rich fall into diverse temptations. Temptation is a primordial phenomenon, which took its root from the Garden of Eden following the enticement of Eve by Satan to munch the forbidden fruit. Later, the bait was passed to Adam and he too fell for it. Ever since, temptation has stuck to the human psyche like a leech. In this poverty-stricken era of advanced fee fraud or 419, falling for temptation is as easy as driving a hot blade through butter.
However, it is not only economic atrophy that exposes individuals to temptations… greed is also a major factor. There are many moneyed folks out there who have uncontrollable appetite to get richer. In fact, they are the ones that are prone to attacks by fraudsters. These social vermin will not go after the have-nots. Because, as it is often said, you cannot bamboozle a man whose only possession is a pair of trousers, to part with it.
A retired army officer, who was highly respected in his community in one of the states in the North Central geo-political zone, recently gave up the ghost after several years of bombardments by 419 folks. It is not very clear how the late retired army top brass got entangled with the Lagos-based crooks. The late army icon who had a chain of houses was very comfortable and had everything going for him. He also had landed properties in places like Lagos, Kano, Kaduna and uncountable others in his host community.
According to close associates of the late army top brass, the crooks cornered him during one of his business trips to Lagos where he was getting army contracts. It was also believed that they cast a spell on him and sold some business ideas to him, which he bought. Then one thing led to another. The turning point came when the crooks tempted their victim with supply of American dollars. They claimed they had the means to mint the hard currency. To acquire the minting equipment, they convinced him to raise some millions of naira, which he did, and that was the genesis of his predicament. Having pumped so much cash into the project, it became increasingly difficult for him to back out. Then, he began to sell off his property as the fraudsters came up with all manner of stories to justify the delay in the procurement of the minting machine.
When the so-called machine was eventually installed, they told their gullible victim that it had to be located in a neighbouring country to shield it away from the radar of law enforcement agencies like the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC). They convinced him against coming to sight the machine on the flimsy excuse that as an influential public figure, he should remain in the background in the event of leakage of their criminal activities. The hoax got to a ridiculous level one day when the fraudsters informed him that they were hauling his own share of the hard currency to him in a chartered bullion van, which they claimed, broke down in Osogbo, Osun state. They then asked him to send some cash to them so that they could fix the van supposedly ferrying huge quantum of dollars. He did, but the van never arrived at its destination let alone deliver any consignments. But because the army officer had been placed under a spell, he could not see through them.
Before the bullion van hoax, the victim had some huge wads of dollar notes delivered to him for one of his foreign trips. The dollars turned out to be fake but he used his influence at the US airport to wriggle out of trouble, claiming he was not aware they were counterfeit. By the time the scales fell off his eyes, the fraudsters had fleeced him of all his possessions.
They even attempted to con him of his residential building. He was asked to part with the Certificate of Occupancy so that they could use it to source for more money for another project in Lagos. However, they did not succeed. At the end of the day, they left him in a condition whereby he was practically living on charity. His condition became exacerbated because his wife and kids who lived overseas had been frightened off by the fraudsters, who were ready to eliminate them should they attempt to rescue the cash cow from their custody.
A combination of hardship, loss of investments and properties, abandonment by family and friends opened him up to hypertension and partial stroke. He battled with the frustration for so long because of his military background. But it was a brief illness that eventually knocked him to his grave.
