US woman stages own abduction: In a shocking incident, an American woman visiting India, staged her own kidnapping to extort money from her parents living in the United States. The woman dialled her mother and told her she was in an “unsafe environment” and was being assaulted and beaten by a man known to her.
27-year-old Chloe Mclaughlin had come to India on May 3, her visa had expired on June 6 and her boyfriend's passport too had run out of validity, police said. Since she was running out of money, she staged her own abduction.
Here's how the events transpired:
- After Chloe called her mother to tell her she got abducted, her mother approached the authorities in India, and the US Embassy forwarded the matter to New Delhi District police.
- On July 10, Mclaughlin again spoke to her mother via a video call on WhatsApp, but just before her mother could get some more information about her, a man entered the room and their call was cut short. All this while, she never disclosed her location in India.
- Amrutha Guguloth, Deputy Commissioner of Police said the US Embassy suspected that the woman was either incapacitated or was being prevented from contacting her family.
- Police used technical intelligence and, in order to ascertain her most recent whereabouts, sought help from Yahoo.com for the IP address Mclaughlin had used to send an e-mail to American Citizen Services regarding her immigration document work on July 9.
- Upon investigation, Police found out she had been staying in Greater Noida, and later conducted raids at a hotel, where she was suspected to have stayed. But the staff there said no one by her name had checked into their hotel.
- Meanwhile, investigators found that Mclaughlin was using someone else’s WiFi when she made the video call to her mother, Guguloth said. "Our team tracked the IP address and the mobile network associated with that IP address, which led us to one Okoroafor Chibuike Okoro, 31, a Nigerian national, in Gurugram. Following his input, police tracked down Mclaughlin and arrested her.
- Mclaughlin, when she was questioned, confessed that she had staged her abduction as she had run out of money within few days of reaching Delhi, following which she and her boyfriend, Okoro, hatched a plan to extort money from her parents, the DCP said.
- She had come to India to stay with Okoro whom she had befriended on Facebook before coming here. Both of them were living together here and were passionate about singing. Legal action is being taken against both for overstaying in India without a valid passport and visa.
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