Ho Chi Minh City police on Saturday arrested Nigerian Eluma Chukwubueze Francis, 37, at a hotel in District 1 for illegally appropriating US$7,000 from many Vietnamese women.

Francis has cheated many women by disguising as a successful businessman living abroad by using different Facebook accounts, according to the police.

After contacting a woman via the social networking site Facebook for a period of time, Francis notified them that he would send them gifts, such as laptops, cameras, phones, clothing, cosmetics, from abroad, said the police.

Then he told the women that they needed to pay transport charges for those items into many bank accounts that Francis specified. He then disappeared without a trace after the money was transferred, according to the police

The most recent case was a woman named M., 48, living in Binh Thanh District. After contacting Francis via a Facebook account named Terry Hammed Williams for a while, M. asked Francis to help her buy an iPhone 5s smartphone.

However, Francis promised M. that he would buy for her the smarphone, plus a camera and a laptop as gifts. Then he asked her to transfer $250 to a bank account for shipping those gifts from the US to Vietnam, and received the money from M. on May 20.

One day later, a person claiming to be Adam - who was in charge of shipping the gifts, informed M. that her gifts were stuck in Malaysia because the money she paid was not enough to pay the shipping charges. Adam then asked her to transfer additional $2,500 to pay for the fines so that her gifts could be free to be shipped to Vietnam.

Feeling being cheated, M. then reported her case to the police.

At the investigation agency, Eluma initially claimed that he deceived many people to appropriate about $ 7,000 in the last 4 months.

Lieutenant Colonel Nguyen Thanh Nhan, the head of a team under the Ho Chi Minh City Police Department of Criminal Investigation on Economic Management Order and Positions (PC46), said local people should be careful when contacting with the others, especially those they do not know well, via social networking sites to avoid being cheated.

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