TRACKING ___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.
The arrested socialite has lived outside Nigeria for nearly 10 years and was reported to be living in Malaysia before moving to Dubai, United Arab Emirates, where he lives in luxury without anyone knowing what he specifically does for a living. Explaining that he was the only one in his generation to escape poverty by whiskers, he said: ‘‘You have to be able to tell me why my parents have to suffer so much and they can’t be proud of N1, 000 that has been given to them by the Federal Government. My mother is from the Niger Delta part of Nigeria where Nigeria’s oil comes from. She has never benefitted one dollar from the Niger Delta, the oil-producing part of Nigeria where she comes from and she is over 60 years old.”
