Comedian Okey Bakassi has taken to social media to warn the public after a carefully executed theft left him and a group of men at an Ikoyi football field short of eight phones and considerably short of trust in strangers.
Bakassi explained that every Wednesday, he and a circle of men gather at a football field in Ikoyi to play. It is a routine, a community, the kind of thing that becomes part of the fabric of your week. On Wednesday, April 15, a young man none of them recognised showed up and asked if he could join the game. Nobody saw any reason to say no. He looked the part, seemed harmless enough, and they let him in.
What followed was textbook. The stranger played for a short while before suddenly clutching an injury and excusing himself to the bench on the sideline, where the group’s belongings had been left while they played. With everyone’s attention fixed on the game in front of them, he quietly gathered eight phones from the bench and slipped away. By the time anyone noticed something was wrong, he was long gone.
Bakassi said the incident has been reported to the authorities and that the group has placed a five million naira bounty on the suspect’s head. He shared a video of himself recounting the story, clearly frustrated, and used the platform to put others on notice about the method the suspect used.
The details of the theft are worth paying attention to. The entry point was trust. The cover was participation. The exit was injury. Clean, simple, and effective enough to work on a group of men who by Bakassi’s own description are not naive. If it can happen to them on a Wednesday morning in Ikoyi, it can happen anywhere.
Watch the video below.
