Interesting story of a Nigerian big boy fraudster based in Toronto. Met this dude and his goons twice around York Mills, and the aura around him made me feel my Lexus RX350 was a bicycle...and my chains, panda. Enjoy the rather long but interesting story below. See how laid back the Canadian Police and Judicial system is.

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The fraudster who called himself Johnson Chrome liked to sit on a bench at the intersection of Hazelton and Yorkville, smoking a Montecristo Edmundo robusto and talking about fashion, cars and cigars to anyone who’d listen. He was charming and handsome, with a neatly trimmed beard, a shaved head and perfect teeth. The perch placed him at the centre of the rarefied universe he’d come to inhabit. His condo, in the former Four Seasons hotel, was steps to the west, and he parked his black Jaguar at the Hazelton Hotel opposite. His gym, the sleek Equinox, was a minute’s walk northwest; his preferred cigar shop, La Casa del Habano, was to the south; and his bespoke clothier, the Italian tailor V Hazelton, was directly behind him. In a neighbourhood known for excess, Chrome was its most conspicuous consumer. He owned 90 pairs of shoes, a collection worth $100,000. One pair was made of crocodile hide and cost $10,000; another was encrusted with hundreds of tiny silver spikes. He wore watches so gargantuan that they seemed to drag on his arm. One of them, the $150,000 Romain Jerome Moon Dust–DNA, contained actual moon dust and fragments of the Apollo 11 spacecraft and the International Space Station. His preferred suit style was Neapolitan—known for its soft con rollino shoulders, high collars and fabrics sourced from exclusive Ariston mills. His dress shirts cost $700, his sunglasses $800 apiece. His personal scent, Clive Christian No. 1, bills itself as “the world’s most expensive perfume,” and at $1,500 a bottle, that’s probably true.

Chrome was generous with his money, regularly paying for meals and drinks for his friends at the Thompson rooftop, Cabana Pool Bar and restaurants like STK, Kasa Moto, One and NAO. On Friday nights, they would head to nightclubs like Lavelle and Wildflower, where they’d spend hundreds, sometimes thousands, on bottle service, drinking and carousing until close. They swapped compliments—how this pocket square neatly embellished those shoelaces, or how these cufflinks flattered that scarf. Chrome was brazen with women, identifying the most beautiful woman at a club and approaching her with confidence.

When asked about the source of his wealth, Chrome would sometimes tell people he was an international businessman, in town for only a short time. One of his acquaintances assumed he was an oil tycoon. But police believe he was one of Canada’s most adept identity thieves, a major player in a sprawling $10-million fraud syndicate that victimized thousands of Torontonians for over a decade. Inside Canada’s financial institutions, he was a household name, suspected of being responsible for thousands of dodgy transactions. He might have evaded the police altogether, if not for a fatal weakness: the compulsion to document each high-priced meal, wild night out and hedonistic indulgence on social media.

According to police, Toronto is a preferred destination for international specialists in identity theft, credit card fraud, extortion, phishing, romance and charity scams, and more. Fraudsters choose Canada because it’s soft on crime compared to the U.S.; there are plenty of extravagant ways to spend the spoils, especially in Toronto and Vancouver; and Canada is next door to one of the world’s wealthiest nations, putting fraudsters within arm’s reach of an international gold mine.

Johnson Chrome was born Adekunle Johnson Omitiran on January 31, 1980, in the Oshodi slums of Lagos, Nigeria. His father, Gbadebo, was a travelling businessman from southwestern Nigeria. When Chrome was a boy, Gbadebo left Chrome’s mother, a Fulani woman from Nigeria’s north, and at one point allegedly had as many as six wives. Gbadebo studied at the University of Exeter in the U.K. and later found his way to Toronto. Chrome’s mother was left to raise him and his brother and stepbrother, with the help of her father, who took the family in. Chrome didn’t respond to interview requests for this story, but sources in Nigeria say he spent much of his childhood on the streets, getting shooed away from the local markets by vendors, who didn’t want a poor kid hanging around. According to one childhood friend, he wasn’t a troublemaker and had no criminal record. He later attended Lagos State University, and in 2003, when he was 23, his father brought him to Toronto.

Chrome enrolled at York University, where he studied economics and lived modestly in a basement apartment near campus. Less than a year later, police believe, he entered the world of fraud. In January 2004, Canada customs intercepted a suspicious parcel destined for Chrome’s apartment. The package had come from Nigeria, and it was heavy enough to qualify for inspection. Inside, officials discovered 36 envelopes addressed to various people in the U.S., each containing a counterfeit cheque for roughly $10,000. The intended recipients had placed ads online selling various items; fraudsters, posing as brokers, wrote letters explaining they wanted to buy the item, but their buyers had already written a cheque for more than the asking price. Would the recipient be so kind as to deposit it and wire back the difference? In most instances of the scam, the intended target is skeptical and ignores the letter, but inevitably, some obey the enclosed instructions. By the time the bank catches on and cancels the transaction, the account holder is on the hook and the scammer is in the wind, a few thousand dollars richer. These kinds of frauds are so popular in Nigeria that they’re now known globally as 419 scams, which refers to the section of Nigeria’s criminal code pertaining to fraud. Police claim that Chrome’s job was to mail the letters from Canada, bypassing the suspicions of U.S. Postal Service officials.

Toronto police set up a fake FedEx delivery to Chrome’s address. When he signed for the parcel, they arrested him and charged him with defrauding the public. Ultimately, however, the Crown decided they would be hard pressed to prove that Chrome was aware of the parcel’s contents, and the charges were withdrawn.

Chrome reappeared on police radar in 2006, when he walked into a Royal Bank on Bathurst and, using forged documents under the name Glen Lee, opened a chequing account. RBC eventually realized that the account was fishy, and police arrested Chrome. He pleaded guilty to fraud under $5,000 and received a 12-month conditional discharge, which effectively wiped his record clean after the sentence was over. By 2007, he’d obtained Canadian citizenship.

According to police, Chrome also developed another elaborate, highly profitable scheme, one that encompassed mail theft, identity theft and credit card fraud. First, they allege, he would intercept mail at condos in Toronto, typically buildings without concierges or front desk staff. He’d enter the mailroom with a set of bump keys and try locks until one popped open, then repeat the process, scooping up as much mail as he could carry. Later, he’d open the mail, find bank documents, and record the target’s name, address and financial information in a notebook. He would call the banks and impersonate the cardholder, trying to extract additional information, and update each profile in his notebook as he went. As he honed his scheme, he’d learn his victims’ dates of birth, phone numbers and email addresses. In many cases, he knew what car his victims drove, where they worked, and the names of their loved ones.

With that information in hand, he’d call the bank’s customer service number and, armed with enough intel to ace the security questions, request a new card. A day or two later, he’d stake out the condo building, wait for the mail carrier to make their drop, enter, and steal the envelope containing the new card.

Next came the spending spree. Often, Chrome would withdraw cash at an ATM or purchase prepaid gift cards. Chrome’s scam was labour-intensive—hustling for a few thousand dollars at a time—but therein lay its brilliance. Banks, though they won’t admit it, tend not to waste their time chasing small sums, which they can quickly reverse. It’s painstaking work for the police to chase down each reported fraud; Crown prosecutors roll their eyes at the complicated paperwork; and judges are often loath to dish out heavy penalties, since the crime is non-violent and the ultimate victim is almost always the banks, which can write off their losses. Despite their best efforts, police say, Chrome was able to continue his operation in plain sight—and no one could do much about it.

Chrome’s girlfriend from Nigeria, Olubukola “Bukky” Jegede, soon followed him to Canada. They married and eventually had three kids. By all accounts, Chrome was a devoted father, taking his kids to the park, the movies, and to church every Sunday. The family moved often—presumably to keep police from knowing his whereabouts.

He spent lavishly on himself, too. In April 2007, using stolen credit cards, he dropped $5,000 on stereo equipment at Bang and Olufsen near Bay and Bloor, and bought 10 pairs of designer shoes at Davids down the street. When police raided his Lawrence West apartment, he ran to the bathroom clutching his phone, which he tried to hide in the garbage can. On it were photos of a residential construction project back in Lagos, plus images of a shipping container housing a car, a flat-screen TV and building materials—many of which are hard to come by in Nigeria. They seized $140,000 of personal property, including clothing, watches and jewellery, plus five TVs, a washing machine and $17,000 in cash. But they didn’t find the evidentiary treasure trove they were looking for: the notebooks, credit cards, receipts and stolen mail that they hoped would convince a judge of the mammoth scope of Chrome’s operation. They began to suspect he kept a stash house for the most damning material.

They eventually found enough evidence from ATM security footage to lay 53 charges. Chrome pleaded guilty to a handful of charges in exchange for getting the others withdrawn, and he got off with two concurrent sentences of six months’ house arrest, once again avoiding significant jail time. And so began a game of cat and mouse between the police and Johnson Chrome that would last nearly a decade.

In august 2007, Chrome and his wife bought a three-storey detached house with a two-car garage in a sleepy Brampton subdivision for $442,000. Later, according to police, he invested his funds into more real estate, eventually putting a down payment on a $3.4-million five-bedroom, custom-built McMansion with a three-car garage, backing onto a golf course in a tony section of Kleinburg.

Like any successful businessman, Chrome learned to delegate. Police say he teamed up with a fellow Nigerian named Mickie Noah, who would allegedly make ATM withdrawals and request new cards and PIN changes as part of Chrome’s operation. Noah had grown up in even poorer circumstances than Chrome, and over time he’d developed a similar appetite for luxury. He mocked Torontonians’ lack of sartorial derring-do. “Downtown, they think they’re stylish, but they all wear black,” he once posted on Instagram. Noah had a predilection for bright jackets, wide-brimmed hats and oversized Iris Apfel glasses. He shopped at Holt Renfrew and Via Cavour, stocking his closet with monk-strap shoes, vibrant ascots and jaunty bow ties. He also shared Chrome’s fondness for cigars—Cohiba robustos were his particular weakness—which he often enjoyed next to his friend on Yorkville’s best-situated bench.

Continue here: https://torontolife.com/city/crime/name-johnson-chrome-hes-citys-wanted-identity-thief/

I couldn't read any further jare.. Na d usual wire wire show off and na d same ppl... ADEKUNLE

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Nbote:
I couldn't read any further jare.. Na d usual wire wire show off and na d same ppl... ADEKUNLE

True. Was at work and saw it on the homepage. Thought it was a short story but on reading and seeing his pictures I remembered him straight up.
What makes this more interesting is that the Canadian police cannot just arrest them Even though they know they r criminals. Reason? The prison are full and the limited spaces are reserv2d for violent criminals. Lol.
Know another guy who is a confirmed wire guy. Arrested and released to continue his way.

delors:

True. Was at work and saw it on the homepage. Thought it was a short story but on reading and seeing his pictures I remembered him straight up.
What makes this more interesting is that the Canadian police cannot just arrest them Even though they know they r criminals. Reason? The prison are full and the limited spaces are reserv2d for violent criminals. Lol.
Know another guy who is a confirmed wire guy. Arrested and released to continue his way.

Little wonder dey are being really strict with their Visa