Posted by By JULIANA FRANCIS on
Fraudsters at the computer village in Lagos recently turned the dream of a young man, who wanted to be a big boy, to a nightmare.
Fraudsters at the computer village in Lagos recently turned the dream of a young man, who wanted to be a big boy, to a nightmare.
Bonaventure Ajakaiye was out looking for a classy cellphone, when he met two touts at the computer village, who sold him a toy that looked so real that he paid N15,000 thinking it was an LG phone.
He said: "I felt it was time I had a good cellphone. I went to the computer village with my brother. It was an LG phone I wanted. I saw an LG distributor shop and a young man standing beside it. He called me and asked me what I wanted. I told him. He went and brought it and we bargained for N15,000."
Ajakaiye thought it was a good bargain because the young man had initially asked for N25,000. Immediately he was given the packaged LG phone, the man directed him to another shop to collect receipt and disappeared.
Ajakaiye was shocked when the shop owner refused to give him receipt. He became alarmed when the shop owner frankly told him that if he didn't buy the LG phone from them, it means he had bought a fake.
He said: "They told me at the shop that if you want to buy LG phone, the customer usually books ahead. The customer would come back few days later to collect it.
"I started searching for the man. It was a long search but I finally found him smoking with other boys at a joint in the market. I told my brother to be watching them while I went in search of a policeman," he said.
He came back to find that the fraudsters had disappeared after driving his brother away.
Ajakaiye, who eventually got a brand new original LG mobile phone, gave thanks to the policemen at Area ‘F' command, Ikeja for arresting the criminals and making them pay.
"Immediately I discovered that the boys had run away, I went to the police command headquarters. It was the Personal Assistant of the Commissioner of Police who followed me to Area ‘F'. The police went to the market and picked some of the boys ," Ajakaiye said.
A boy who was picked up during the raid revealed the identity of the fraudsters, who were later tracked down.
Ajakaiye said as soon as he realised he had been duped, he knew hell would be let loose at home once his father knew. He said: "I thought I had lost all that money. I wondered how I could tell my father that N15,000 had just gone down the drain."
The fraudsters had a term for their act. They called it palacy. It refers to the sale of phoney cellphones camouflaged as real ones.
The crooks usually hang around reputable shops. They would show a real phone to a prospective buyer, and they would even test it. But once a deal is struck and they begin to pack the set, they would smartly place a toy in the pack instead of the real thing.