{"id":24399,"date":"2024-03-22T13:25:30","date_gmt":"2024-03-22T13:25:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/?p=24399"},"modified":"2024-03-22T13:25:30","modified_gmt":"2024-03-22T13:25:30","slug":"friends-staged-own-kidnapping-for-100000-ransom-police","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/2024\/03\/22\/friends-staged-own-kidnapping-for-100000-ransom-police\/","title":{"rendered":"Friends Staged Own Kidnapping for $100,000 Ransom – Police"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Gabriella Ogbu<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

“Two friends, Dennise Okuonu and Ayodele Balogun, have been taken into custody for allegedly staging their own kidnapping. The suspects had threatened their parents that they would be put to death if they did not pay the roughly $100,000 ransom.<\/p>\n

Dennise Okuonu, an undergraduate student at the National Institute of Information Technology (NIIT), was named by the police as the plot’s mastermind. On his part, Ayodele, a 200-level student at the Adeniran Ogunsanya College of Education (ACOED), Ijanikin, had allegedly agreed to the plans to extort money from his dad.<\/p>\n

City & Crime discovered that Dennise had set up the fictitious abduction of Ayodele in order to obtain funds for himself.<\/p>\n

Benjamin Hundeyin, a public relations officer for the Lagos State Police, verified the event and stated that Dennise had perfected the preparations to assist his friend Ayodele in raising funds.<\/p>\n

According to Hundeyin, Dennise then used his phone to contact Ayodele’s father, who is a driver, through text messages. At first, the two allegedly requested $10,000 as ransom to free Ayodele. “He said the money should be paid into his Binance account using Bitcoin,” Hundeyin said. In addition, he sent Ayodele’s father a Bitcoin wallet with the amount. Dennise put Ayodele in a room at his father’s hotel while Ayodele’s father was working feverishly to get his son freed from the alleged kidnappers.<\/p>\n

To make it realistic, both pals proceeded to a bush near the location where Ayodele’s picture was shot, tying his hands and legs together. Then, Ayodele’s father received the photo. Dennise also staged his own kidnapping to generate additional funds, increasing the ransom to $100,000. The two left the hotel in response to this new update.<\/p>\n

To further threaten Ayodele’s father, Dennise, probably with the help of others, took pictures of Ayodele’s father’s place of work and insisted that Ayodele would be killed if the money was not paid. He continued, noting that the investigation was still ongoing and that following that, the suspects would face charges in court.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Gabriella Ogbu “Two friends, Dennise Okuonu and Ayodele Balogun, have been taken into custody for allegedly staging their own kidnapping. The suspects had threatened their parents that they would be put to death if they did not pay the roughly $100,000 ransom. Dennise Okuonu, an undergraduate student at the National Institute of Information Technology […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":24400,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[181,172],"tags":[59],"class_list":["post-24399","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-crime","category-news","tag-featured"],"aioseo_notices":[],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24399","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24399"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24399\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24401,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24399\/revisions\/24401"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/24400"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24399"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24399"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24399"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}