Thir­ty-five-year-old Kern An­drews of Tarou­ba was ar­rest­ed by the South­ern Di­vi­sion Fraud Squad for ob­tain­ing goods by false pre­tences.

An­drews ap­peared vir­tu­al­ly be­fore San Fer­nan­do Mag­is­trate, Ra­jen­dra Ram­bachan and was grant­ed bail in the sum of $200,000 to be ap­proved by the Reg­is­trar of the Court or a cash al­ter­na­tive of $30,000.

The charges were laid af­ter An­drews al­leged­ly ac­quired 32 mo­bile phones us­ing an il­le­git­i­mate bank man­ag­er’s cheque.

Ac­cord­ing to po­lice re­ports, con­tact was made with the mo­bile phone deal­ers on Jan­u­ary 8th1, by some­one pur­port­ing to be from the Pres­by­ter­ian Church Board.

A num­ber of cell phones was re­quest­ed and de­liv­ery sched­uled for the fol­low­ing day. An­drews al­leged­ly met with the de­liv­ery per­son­nel from the com­pa­ny and pre­sent­ed a manger’s cheque val­ued at $54,420 from a rep­utable bank­ing in­sti­tu­tion.

The cheque was ac­cept­ed and the phones hand­ed over, how­ev­er, when the cheque was de­posit­ed to the com­pa­ny’s ac­count, it was found to be fraud­u­lent.

An­drews, a taxi dri­ver, was charged on Fri­day 26th Feb­ru­ary af­ter in­ves­ti­ga­tions led by Sgt Seep­er­sad, in­clud­ing Cpl. (Ag.) Lewis and oth­er of­fi­cers of the Fraud Squad South Of­fice along with PC Ram­lal of the Mara­bel­la Po­lice Sta­tion. He is ex­pect­ed to reap­pear be­fore the court on March 29th 2021.