A Delta State man, Michael James, has confessed to staging his own kidnapping in an attempt to extort ₦25 million from his family, saying he owed his siblings money he had already spent and had no way of repaying.
In an interrogation video shared by Delta State Police spokesperson Bright Edafe on Sunday, James said the scheme began on July 1, when his family sent him to dispose of refuse. Instead of returning home, he abandoned his wheelbarrow and hid in a nearby bush. “My name is Michael James. I am from Edo State, but I live in Delta State. I kidnapped myself. The reason I kidnapped myself was that I owed my sister and my brother, and I had already spent the money. I had no way of paying it back,” he said.
James said his mother tried calling repeatedly, but he ignored her calls before eventually picking up to claim he had been kidnapped and that his captors were demanding ₦25 million, then abruptly ending the call. He later called again, telling his mother the kidnappers were beating him and that he had transferred ₦700,000 to them. When he learned that police and local vigilantes had gotten involved in the search, he grew anxious. As rain approached later that day, he left the bush on a motorcycle for another location and called his family again, this time claiming he had escaped his captors.
Edafe said the command responded to the initial distress call by deploying digital intelligence to trace James’s location, eventually tracking him to where he was allegedly being held, only for him to emerge on his own, claiming he had escaped. “He later confessed that he kidnapped himself so he could extort his family the sum of N25m,” Edafe wrote.
The case fits a pattern police have flagged before. On June 9, the Ogun State Police Command arrested eight foreign nationals in Adiyan, Agbado, over a similar scheme in which a staged abduction was used to extort money from unsuspecting relatives abroad. Command spokesperson Oluseyi Babaseyi said intelligence-led investigation exposed that case as a fabricated kidnapping rather than a genuine one.
