Nigerians Arrested In One Of The Largest Cases Of Fraud In US History (Full List)

Here is a video of the press release by FBI on Nigerian internet scam syndicate.

The yahoo boys have scammed Americans to the tune of $1.1bn between Jan-July this year alone.

The US Attorney’s Office says Thursday most of the defendants are Nigerian citizens.

After search warrants were executed at multiple locations across L.A. County on Thursday morning, federal prosecutors announced a 252-count indictment that accuses 80 people in the U.S. and Nigeria of participating in a "massive conspiracy to steal millions of dollars through a variety of fraud schemes."

The defendants allegedly laundered the funds through a Los Angeles-based money laundering network. Eleven of them were arrested Thursday in Southern California, while three others were taken into custody elsewhere in the U.S., according to the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Central District of California.

Two were already in federal custody on other charges, and one was arrested earlier this week. The remaining defendants are believed to be abroad, most of them in Nigeria, authorities said.

According to the indictment, the accused used business email compromise frauds, romance scams and schemes targeting the elderly to defraud victims out of millions of dollars.
See the list below and watch the video after the cut..

Watch the full video and see more
https://zenithnaija.com/1-1b-internet-scam-video-of-press-release-by-fbi-on-nigerian-syndicate/

Most of them are nigerians Ok

so sad

Shame

Ours name get soared every second both home and abroad

I wish I was never a Nigerian. How can you carry " defrauding" to. Developed society.
These guys are plain stupid

This list is blood curdling haba!

Does it mean Nigerians don't have any other job abroad now than crime and fraud? How can this number of people be involved, and yet they've not even finished their arrests?

This is such a huge disgrace. This country is on a downward spiral...geez!

Look at their nicknames: 'Thank you Jesus, 'Pastor Ken', Son of God etc. Bunch of fraudsters constantly making things more difficult for legit folks like us...Awon adojutini gbogbo...

Please lock them up & throw away the keys...

lalasticlala
Mynd44

Unbelivable, close to 99% from one region! Was Abike Dabiri right or not when she said 20 out of 21 Nigerians awaiting execution in Indonesia are from Anambra? She was speaking from facts while many were countering her based on sentiment and tribalism. Here is another proof, this is one of the reasons PayPal and many other online businesses don't want to include Nigeria in any financial dealing which is affecting many legitimate users from Nigeria. EFCC should intensify more effort locally while other countries around the world should collaborate with EFCC to flush out fraudsters and drug dealers in their midst. Nigeria, will be great again! And believe me, there is something in the east aside poverty that we are yet to understand, but pushing youngs and adults into drug and fraud related cases than other regions in the country.

$1.1billion between Jan to July. These guys are stealing the yearly budget of some countries.

Zoommmed
See who are giving us bad name abeg.

Buhari I blame u

Hmmm

These are the Neanderthals reaping from a farm they never planted and expecting to enjoy the proceeds thereof, making the legit 9-5 hustlers seem as though they weren't hustling right.

I'm sure it was Buhari and our politicians that sent them away from Nigeria to go to the US, a country that hasn't been bastardized by the ruling elites to go and steal instead of hustling and earning a living by legitimate means.

When Buhari said most of the youths were lazy, so many failed to understand the sense in that statement even though I might not be cool with every one of his utterances and governing style.

The average Nigerian youth's psyche has been programmed and messed up to believe that the fast lane is the only and best way, not knowing it is indeed the highway to destruction and doom.

How do you intend to help God do his work in your life, or jumping the gun of life due to peer and societal pressures/impatience to make it big. This, I tell people is akin to avoiding the mandatory NYSC where, if you are found out to have deliberately skipped service, there'd be consequences.

Life is a process which has never been a Bed of Roses. Even God never promised us a life devoid of topsy turvy, his promises are that he won't saddle us with more than we could bear, and shall surely help us overcome.

So, if you decide to circumvent the NYSC of life, you'd be found out when the time is ripe and made to get back on queue to do your service and follow the procedure. No short cuts. Just pray you get found out in good time when you are still young and healthy to re-serve, and not when you might have been beat-down walking on a stick.

Life is simple if only we could sit back, reason and refuse to be pressured. We must quit with complicating our lives.

I learned these life lessons the hard way and I have given up myself to speaking up for this and other societal ills particularly among the youths. I won't stand aloof watching Nigerian youths self-destructing without lending a voice, God forbid.

Finally, whatever you garner up by crooked means shall be decimated by the same means and you won't even have an idea how it happened. I am a living witness to this and did a book on my life to teach the youths.

We are precariously seated on a keg of gun powder with our youths, we need to start changing our orientation and value system.

On a lighter note, expect American cars to start getting more and more expensive because the dealers are being swept of the streets. Some of our NL dealers fit dey among dem sef.

Nothing beats living and earning legitimately. No matter how little.

Most people didn't understand where EFCC was getting the renewed vigor in clamping down on these boys nationwide. Now you have your answers. FBI dey their nyansh.

These boys must hear word. Their laulau noise making don dey reduce sha

Lazy thieves home and abroad.

Forget about the tribe it's coming from, THIS IS A VERY BAD NEWS for Nigeria.

Mo daran!
Most of them are from southeast .

Wow! Just wow!
99.99% of them are from the southeast mehn !
This one weak me, I can’t lie .

Ok.. let check their names

VERY SHAMEFUL

This is not good for Naija image

this is so embarrassing

Our name is in mud, both home and abroad, too bad.

You won't know how disadvantageous it is until you're traveling out of the country, and those 'racists' begin hailing you scammer, knowing you're a Nigerian.

GOOD, PLEASE JUST KILL THEM ALL.

sreamsense:
Unbelivable, close to 99% from one region! Was Abike Dabiri right or not when she said 20 out of 21 Nigerians awaiting execution in Indonesia are from Anambra? She was speaking from facts while many were countering her based on sentiment and tribalism. Here is another proof, this is one of the reasons PayPal and many other online businesses don't want to include Nigeria in any financial dealing which is affecting many legitimate users from Nigeria. EFCC should intensify more effort locally while other countries around the world should collaborate with EFCC to flush out fraudsters and drug dealers in their midst. Nigeria, will be great again! And believe me, there is something in the east aside poverty that we are yet to understand, but pushing youngs and adults into drug and fraud related cases than other regions in the country.

Anyone caught, tried and convicted should pay for his crime! This is the main thing!

Trying to draw attention to their ethnicity is for what? If your country had provided them with opportunities to earn a decent living i doubt we would be here discussing this today! This issue of getting gov't to be accountable and work for the people is all what IPOB is about! If you have a problem with their modus-operandi then start your own movement to change things....just like Sowore tried to do before they silenced him!

They will not come to this thread and talk now. They are hiding. mtchew

This is one of the reasons why they don't grant us visas anymore..

You have opportunity to travel abroad and you still go dey do fraud. Awon oloriburuko gbogbo.. We know them.

SHAMEFUL.

Please, I'm not condoning fraud, but I just want a more balanced reaction.

StrikeBack:
I wish I was never a Nigerian. How can you carry " defrauding" to. Developed society.
These guys are plain stupid

Man please. USA and its citizens are the overlords and originators of fraud of all kinds:

Insurance fraud: $80 billion a year across all lines of insurance.
https://www.insurancefraud.org/statistics.htm

Fraud as a result of data breaches - Equifax, Target, and a few others come to mind.

Medical Fraud: $1.24Billion
https://www.npr.org/2019/04/10/711688988/feds-charge-24-in-alleged-1-2-billion-medicare-fraud-scheme

Recent corporate frauds:
https://www.forbes.com/pictures/efik45ekdjl/our-take-on-the-10-biggest-frauds-in-recent-u-s-history-2/#69f48367775a

https://www.iii.org/fact-statistic/facts-statistics-identity-theft-and-cybercrime

sreamsense:
this is one of the reasons PayPal and many other online businesses don't want to include Nigeria in any financial dealing which is affecting many legitimate users from Nigeria.

USA and Europe are the source of much more fraud. However, the profits from those places far outweighs the fraud. Conversely, Nigeria is not that valuable a market for them so they can afford to lose our business.

Name checkers running to this thread right now like castrated kangaroos. Believe it or not, internet fraud together with other social vices is a colorally of a failed government. How many countries with a working government engage in internet fraud? Later now our yahoo yahoo plus government will now come and condemn this act meanwhile, they have scammed our collective futures and hopes.
This is really sad and has left a chasm on our collective image, more painful is that our army of young people are bracing up to join internet fraud which many of them see as their only salvation. So this shame and embarrassment isn't going away anytime soon.

Naija no fit carry last
We are #1!!!

https://www.nairaland.com/5120718/nigeria-ranked-1-scamming


Take the scam described below. Average citizens of other countries are incapable of it without govt involvement (note the bolded):

washingtonpost.com
The Washington Post

Business

Nigerian scammers are stealing BILLIONS of dollars

By Cleve R. Wootson Jr.

June 12, 2018 at 2:56 PM


The FBI said June 11 it made 74 arrests in connection with 419 Nigerian email scams. The Post's Cleve R. Wootson Jr. explains how these scams have managed to be so successful. (Allie Caren/The Washington Post)

Savvy people already know it’s a bad idea to trust an email from a Nigerian prince hoping to use their bank account to unload a dead relative’s vast wealth.

And they’re just as suspicious of the sudden Internet-based love interest with questionable grammar who needs a few thousand untraceable dollars to clear up a passport issue in time for a magical first date.

But in a sophisticated and terrifying evolution of the Nigerian 419 scam, web-savvy crime syndicates are figuring out ways to bilk U.S. citizens of billions.

On Monday, the FBI announced the arrest of 74 people across the world — including 29 people in Nigeria and 41 in the United States — who authorities say were part of complex international networks that combed filings by the Securities and Exchange Commission, spoofed CEO emails and successfully targeted even hardened employees whose jobs are to safeguard their companies from financial mismanagement.

The recent scams have the same DNA as the poorly worded emails that have been showing up in people’s inboxes since the 1990s. Instead of playing on hopes of finding love or lust for sudden wealth, they play on fears about missing a vital company payment or upsetting a boss’s boss.

“[Scammers] are doing their research … going onto company websites and looking for the right people,” FBI Assistant Director Scott Smith, who helped lead the investigation, told the Wall Street Journal. “They may even go as far as pulling annual reports and finding what companies they do business with and [impersonating] those accounts.”

Adeyemi Odufuye and his team, for example, sifted SEC records, company websites and other business documents, looking for the names and email addresses of chief executives, chief financial officers and controllers, court documents say.

Odufuye, who had a half dozen nicknames, including “Jefe,” the Spanish word for “chief” or “boss,” led a crew responsible for stealing $2.6 million, including $440,000 from one business in Connecticut, according to the Justice Department.

The schemes used a variety of tactics to gain people’s trust and steal their money, federal authorities say. They registered website domain names that were hard to distinguish from the companies they were targeting — impersonations meant to give emails an air of authenticity. Some of those emails arrived with malware attachments that would snap images of a victim’s desktop or transmit key log information — a hacker trick for nabbing someone’s password.

They even employed money mules whose sole purpose was to move the ill-gotten gains from account to account, authorities say, disguising the electronic paper trail from investigators.

Odufuye was extradited from Britain on Jan. 3. He pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and one count of aggravated identity theft.

The arrests highlighted just how many people are falling for the latest iterations of the Nigerian hustle, as well as the staggering losses American businesses are accruing. According to FBI figures obtained by the Journal, victims of such scams reported $275 million in losses in 2015. By 2017, reported losses had more than doubled, to $675 million. And in the first quarter of this year, more than 4,000 victims reported $685 million in losses. The bureau estimates American businesses have lost more than $3.7 billion as a result of the schemes.

Since January 2015, the FBI estimated last year, there has been a 1,300 percent increase in identified exposed losses from similar scams. On Monday, the FBI issued a public service announcement about the scams.

Last year, FBI Special Agent Martin Licciardo, an organized crime investigator, said such crimes are “a serious threat on a global scale. The ability of these criminal groups to compromise legitimate business email accounts is staggering. … They are experts at deception.”

Scammers target businesses of all sizes, sometimes spending months studying a company’s organizational chart, the FBI said. They target people who frequently transfer large amounts of money and sensitive records in the course of business. They impersonate executives, human relations staff, law firms and trusted vendors. They usually insist that whatever bogus issue they’ve raised be cleared up as soon as possible, often by an immediate wire transfer. Discretion is often advised.

Another pair of alleged swindlers, Paul Wilson Aisosa and Gloria Okolie, went after a real estate closing attorney in Augusta, Ga. Such attorneys routinely keep large sums of money in a trust, often serving as a go-between for buyers and sellers. But Aisosa and Okolie convinced the unnamed attorney to send the proceeds from a recent sale — nearly $250,000 dollars — to Okolie’s account instead of to the seller, authorities said.

The pair is awaiting trial after being accused of laundering $665,000 in illicit funds, according to the Justice Department.

Before the attorney’s deposit, court documents say, the only cash in the account was the $100 required to start it.

How come they are all Igbos?

GeekfromLasgidi:
How come they are all Igbos?

Our flathead_ brothers always representing .

[s]

IGBOSON1:


Anyone caught, tried and convicted should pay for his crime! This is the main thing!

Trying to draw attention to their ethnicity is for what? If your country had provided them with opportunities to earn a decent living i doubt we would be here discussing this today! This issue of getting gov't to be accountable and work for the people is all what IPOB is about! If you have a problem with their modus-operandi then start your own movement to change things....just like Sowore tried to do before they silenced him!

[/s]
Typical Igbo always looking for a way to defend his brothers .
Na thunder go fire that your mouth las las

IGBOSON1:


Anyone caught, tried and convicted should pay for his crime! This is the main thing!

Trying to draw attention to their ethnicity is for what? If your country had provided them with opportunities to earn a decent living i doubt we would be here discussing this today! This issue of getting gov't to be accountable and work for the people is all what IPOB is about! If you have a problem with their modus-operandi then start your own movement to change things....just like Sowore tried to do before they silenced him!

Oga, don't even go to country providing opportunities... We are all in this together and I am not a scammer...

Besides, if that nonsense narrative is your defense then how come they still went to a country that provided good opportunities only to go on scamming spree.


Respect yourself Oga