Arrested Nigerian Instagram celebrity, Ramon Abass, aka Hushpuppi, said his affluent lifestyle came after he and his family live in abject poverty that claimed the life of his elder sister, who passed away due to typhoid fever. The United Arab Emirates (UAE) Police authority in a raid dubbed Fox Hunt 2 carried out on June 10, arrested Hushpuppi and 12 other members of his crew, including Olalekan Ponle, aka Woodberry, for allegedly defrauding 1,926,400 persons from different parts of the world, fraud amounting to 1.6 billion dirham (N168bn) perpetrated by the gang. In a video released on its official Twitter handle on Thursday, the DPF police said a special team had been tracking the suspect and his gang’s activities on social media for about four months.
The police said 13 luxury cars, estimated at 35 million dirham (N3.7bn) were recovered from the house, where the suspects were arrested. But explaining his ‘rise to fame’ in a viral video he made in May 2018 when he had a heated exchange of words with acclaimed human rights activist, Deji Adeyanju, who at the time asked the anti-graft body, Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), to investigate and prosecute the internet socialite’s source of wealth, Hushpuppi detailed his purported journey from poverty to luxury. In the video which lasted for 14 minutes, Hushpuppi recounted how his sister died of typhoid fever in a General Hospital in Lagos because his parents couldn’t afford to pay the hospital fees, adding that poverty had been having a field day in his family, spanning several generations before his parents, who also wallowed in poverty.
