A yet another shocking revelation has been made online which disclosed how Seun Egbegbe, alleged phone thief and ex-lover of actress Toyin Aimakhu, committed a fraud.
The dealer, Semiu and Egbegbe had met briefly on December 9, 2015, at a MultiChoice outlet opened by the latter two days earlier at Uncle Joe Bus Stop at Mokola area, Ibadan.
About 9 am on that day; the dealer told SaharaReporters, a man he had never met walked into the outlet requesting to buy two GOtv decoders.
The prospective customer, added the dealer, said he was expecting a friend of his to bring money with which he would pay for the decoders.
Shortly after his arrival, another man arrived wearing jellabiya, the long robe favored by Muslim men, and gave the prospective customer some money.
The dealer, who was working when the jellabiya-wearing man handed over the cash, said he did not know the exact sum given to the first man.
After handing over the cash, the man in jellabiya left.
Curiously, too, the prospective customer, who would later turn out to be Egbegbe, the dealer explained, stepped out of the shop and waited outside, where he was shielded from view by a glass door.
Wondering what was happening to the envisaged transaction, the dealer stepped out to check on Egbegbe.
He found him standing outside and sought to know what was going on.
Egbegbe, who kept impersonating a prospective customer, then pointed to a man waiting for downstairs, signaling that he was the one that would provide information required for the activation of the decoders.
Though he was speaking, said the dealer, his voice was drowned out by music from the loud speakers hired to create awareness for the outlet.
That was the beginning of trouble. When the jellabiya-wearing man got upstairs to meet the dealer, he announced to him that Egbegbe had taken $3,000 from him.
He could not make any connection between what he heard and the transaction he was supposed to carry out.
I considered it a joke initially, but later realized that the second guy was a Hausa man, who had innocently transacted business with the pretended customer on the assumption that he owned the MultiChoice outlet,” the dealer said.
The Hausa man, recalled the dealer, told him that the pretended customer had phoned him from a Fidelity Bank branch opposite the MultiChoice outlet, claiming to own that place and requesting to change naira to dollars.
Apparently, Egbegbe had failed to give the forex trader the naira equivalent of the money he took from him, with currency trader lured into a false sense of security that Egbegbe owned the dealership and could always find him there.
When the currency trader realized that the man he transacted business with was not the owner, he raised the alarm.
“Before I knew what was happening, I was surrounded by over 20 Hausa men and dragged to Sabo, the hub of forex trading in Ibadan,” the dealer told SaharaReporters.
From there, things would get nastier. At Sabo, the currency traders convinced that the dealer knew the man who took $3,000, descended on him.
“I was beaten for about 45 minutes and was about to be killed before a policeman from State Investigation Bureau (SIB), named Samson, intervened and ordered us to move to Oyo State Police Command Headquarters at Eleyele,” he recalled.
While relieved to have escaped jungle justice, there was to be no further let-up to his ordeal.
At the SIB, the dealer and other currency traders were told to wait in a room, while the man from whom the $3,000 was taken, Samson and the SIB head went for a private discussion. After their discussion, and without any interrogation, he claimed, they were transferred to AKS for another round of beating.
At AKS, he added, they kept asking him to refund the $3,000.
