The T&T Po­lice Ser­vice’s Cy­ber Crime Unit is in­ves­ti­gat­ing the case of a man scam­ming women in var­i­ous ways as the COVID-19 virus spreads across the coun­try.

The man has been steal­ing women’s iden­ti­ties and al­so pre­tends to be a mil­lion­aire’s agent and a po­lice of­fi­cer while try­ing to get women to per­form per­son­al sex­u­al acts on cam­era. He al­leged­ly of­fers the vic­tims hun­dreds of thou­sands of dol­lars to do the sex­u­al acts but when they are done they re­alise they have been fleeced. The scam­mer is al­so try­ing to get pass­words to his vic­tims’ elec­tron­ic de­vices and so­cial me­dia ac­counts, Guardian Me­dia un­der­stands.

The man may be tak­ing ad­van­tage of the fact that some peo­ple are los­ing jobs as a re­sult of the shut­down of sev­er­al small busi­ness­es as COVID takes a toll on the coun­try.

Some of his vic­tims, who do not want to be iden­ti­fied, told To­ba­go To­day their or­deal be­gan on March 12, when they be­gan re­ceiv­ing What­sÅpp calls and texts from an un­known num­ber.

The man first called us­ing the pho­to of a friend in the women’s so­cial me­dia cir­cle. He then dis­con­nect­ed the call, as­sumed the iden­ti­ty of the per­son in the pho­to, be­gan a con­ver­sa­tion via text and used fa­mil­iar nick­names—known on­ly to the per­sons in the cir­cle.

“He tells you he spoke to your friend and she al­ready per­formed a per­son­al sex­u­al act, live on cam­era, for a Trinci­ty man and re­ceived the mon­ey in her bank ac­count for the per­for­mance,” one of the vic­tims told Guardian Me­dia.

An­oth­er vic­tim said the women in one group even­tu­al­ly re­alised what he was up to and post­ed the in­for­ma­tion on their Face­book pages. The women then re­port­ed the mat­ter to their var­i­ous dis­trict sta­tions. All of the vic­tims sent their cit­i­zens’ re­ports re­ceipts to Guardian Me­dia as proof they had re­port­ed the scam to the po­lice.

The women said on March 23, the man changed his method of op­er­a­tions. He al­leged­ly called one woman in a group us­ing a pri­vate num­ber and told her to spread the word that he was call­ing from the TTPS Cy­ber Crime Unit and want­ed to set a spe­cif­ic pro­gramme on their elec­tron­ic de­vices to catch the per­pe­tra­tor. He said he need­ed their de­vices’ elec­tron­ic spe­cial code to in­stall the pro­gramme and their so­cial me­dia ac­counts.

“The mes­sage was so be­liev­able that we wait­ed for the call at the ap­point­ed time to give the ‘sergeant’ our in­for­ma­tion,” one of the vic­tims said.

She said one vic­tim im­me­di­ate­ly en­quired from the Cy­ber­crime Unit if the man was an of­fi­cer. How­ev­er, be­fore she could re­lay the in­for­ma­tion to her friend, she had al­ready sent her per­son­al in­for­ma­tion to the man, she said.

Guardian Me­dia reached out to As­sis­tant Com­mis­sion­er of Po­lice—North West Di­vi­sion William Nurse for a com­ment on the mat­ter. He said the of­fi­cers from the unit had in­di­cat­ed “they are ac­tive­ly pur­su­ing the mat­ter.”