Police arrest 2 over alleged recruitment scam

The police have arrested two persons for allegedly collecting money from unsuspecting job seekers under the guise of facilitating their recruitment into the security services.

The two — Bernard Amano Wayo, 47, and Emmanuel Sackey, 55 — were arrested at the Golden Tulip Hotel in Accra where they had set up a temporary recruitment point last Friday.

The suspects, according to the police, were collecting between GH¢2,000 and GH¢3,000 from their victims, using purported official forms and the venue as decoys in the recruitment scam to convince their victims.

A source close to the Police Intelligence Directorate told the Daily Graphic yesterday that at the time of their arrest, the suspects were at a meeting with three of their victims whom they were assisting to fill forms, after collecting money from them under the pretext of assisting them to secure enlistment into the Ghana Police Service.

Waiting list

The source said initial investigations showed that the suspects had targeted applicants on the police recruitment waiting list.

It explained that the suspects contacted one of the victims, who sought financial assistance from a public official.

The public official, who wanted to be sure before parting with the cash, contacted the police to ascertain if the Ghana Police Service was recruiting persons on its waiting list.

The source said the police indicated that there was no such exercise taking place and then began to suspect that the perpetrators might be engaged in a scam.

To bust the scammers, it said, the police supported one of the victims to be part of the recruitment, a process which aided the police to arrest the suspects.

It appealed to any member of the public who had been a victim to contact the Special Investigations Unit of the Criminal Investigations Department of the Ghana Police Service for assistance.

It said the suspects would be arraigned as soon as preliminary investigations were concluded.

Recruitment scams

Recruitment scams around enlistment into the security services, especially the Ghana Police Service, are not new.

The most recent of such scams hit the institution in 2015 when hundreds of men and women arrived at five police training depots for enlistment into the service but were turned away after it was discovered that the enlistment was a scam and that their recruitment letters were fake.

The Interior Ministry, together with the Police Administration, launched investigations into the matter and mounted an intensive search for culprits.

After two years of investigations into the police recruitment scam, a former Director General in charge of Human Resource at the Ghana Police Service, Commissioner of Police (COP) Mr Patrick Timbilla, was removed from the service for his role in the scandal.