While I was reading news, I came across a sentence in which I couldn't understand the use of the preposition 'of'.
A state owned cooperative society has been accused of having defrauded
scores of unsuspecting students of sizeable sums of money as tution
fee by enrolling them in vocational training course.
Best Answer
The definition of defraud is "to take something from someone by fraud." The direct object of the verb is the one who lost something. The preposition of is used with this verb to indicate what was taken. So, we can roughly reword the sentence as follows:
The phrase with of is optional; you can leave it out, in which case you are not specifying what was taken.
There are other verbs with similar meanings that use out of for this relationship, to say what was lost.