US Sends Nigerian Million-dollar Scammer To Jail For 4 Years

A Nigerian man was sentenced to prison, according to the US Department of Justice, for his involvement in a cybercrime ring that preyed on people and companies for more than five years.

Solomon Ekunke Okpe, 31, of Lagos, was a member of a group that, between December 2011 and January 2017, planned and carried out several scams, including business email compromise (BEC), romance scams, working-from-home scams, and others.

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Okpe and his co-conspirators allegedly targeted innocent bystanders as well as banks and corporations in the US and abroad intending to cause “more than a million dollars in losses” to their US victims, but it is unclear from the DoJ’s announcement whether this was accomplished.

The First American Holding Corporation and MidFirst Bank were two targets in the group’s objectives.

Okpe and his associates carried out phishing attempts to obtain passwords and other sensitive information from their victims. They then gained access to their victims’ internet accounts and used bogus identities to scam people, banks, and companies while swiping credit cards.

US Sends Million-dollar Scammer To Jail For 4 Years

Okpe and other gang members used BEC attacks to deceive banks and other businesses into making unauthorized money transfers to accounts they controlled while assuming the identities of trustworthy people.

Also, the scammers constructed phony profiles on job boards and discussion boards, professing to hire people for what they represented as legitimate work-from-home positions, but which were really designed to serve as money mules, transferring stolen money between different accounts.

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In addition, Okpe and his fellow criminals created bogus accounts on dating websites, targeting lonely hearts with their fictitious identities, in an attempt to trick them into wiring tens of thousands of dollars overseas.

Okpe was initially arrested in Malaysia and was detained there for more than two years while he contested his extradition to the United States.

US Sends Million-dollar Scammer To Prison For 4 Years

Both Okpe and a co-conspirator, Johnson Uke Obogo, pleaded guilty to wire, bank and mail fraud charges in December last year.

Obogo, who was arrested in the United Kingdom, was sentenced to one year and one day in prison for his role in the criminal enterprise. Okpe was sentenced this week to four years and one month in prison.