De­tec­tives at the Port-of-Spain Crim­i­nal In­ves­ti­ga­tions De­part­ment (CID) be­lieve they have made in­roads in­to an on­line rob­bery ring fol­low­ing the ar­rest of an­oth­er sus­pect.

Jef­fery Joseph aka ‘Ba­by Jeff, ’ 24, of Cal­vary Hill, East Dry Riv­er, Port-of-Spain, who po­lice be­lieve is the main sus­pect in a se­ries of re­ports of on­line scams and rob­beries, was charged yes­ter­day with rob­bery with ag­gra­va­tion and rob­bery with vi­o­lence by WPC Pas­caul Med­i­na and PC Cuffie, re­spec­tive­ly.

Joseph is ex­pect­ed to an­swer to the charges when he ap­pears vir­tu­al­ly at the Port-of-Spain Mag­is­trates’ Court on Mon­day 26th Ju­ly, 2021. Joseph is the sixth sus­pect to be ar­rest­ed and charged in the Port-of-Spain Di­vi­sion in con­nec­tion with these types of on­line rob­beries.

Five oth­ers were charged in April 2021. He was ar­rest­ed on Ju­ly 22nd fol­low­ing a joint ex­er­cise by CID de­tec­tives and spe­cial­ists at­tached to the CID An­a­lyt­i­cal Unit who were in­ves­ti­gat­ing the cir­cum­stances in which un­sus­pect­ed buy­ers were lured by a sell­er on sev­er­al Face­book mar­ket­places.

These in­ci­dents are re­port­ed to have oc­curred in Feb­ru­ary and Ju­ly 2021 in the Cen­tral and Besson Street Polic­ing Dis­tricts. Ac­cord­ing to po­lice re­ports, po­ten­tial buy­ers re­spond­ed to what was lat­er learned to be fic­ti­tious on­line ad­ver­tise­ments and di­rect­ed to un­fa­mil­iar lo­ca­tions.

Once there, po­lice were told, they were robbed of their prop­er­ty and cash.