Nigerian gets 19 years in Internet scam

IKEJA, Nigeria, March 17 (UPI) -- A Nigerian court says a convicted Internet scammer will have to sell some land to pay back the Australian woman he bilked by pretending to be in love with her.

Lawal Adekunie Nurudeen, a college student, was sentenced in Ikeja to 19 years in prison and ordered to pay $47,000 to the woman he had courted by posing online as a 59-year-old white widower.

The restitution will likely come in part from the sale of two plots of land and the Honda Prelude that Nurudeen had purchased with the money he had conned from the woman, CNN reported Tuesday.

Nigerian police said the defendant, who is already married, told the woman he was a British businessman working in Nigeria who had recently lost his family in a traffic accident. He then posed as a doctor and told the victim her new sweetheart was himself in the hospital and needed $47,000 for treatment.