OKLAHOMA CITY — A foreign national was sentenced to four years and one month in prison for his role in a cybercriminal group operating from Nigeria and Malaysia that executed complex financial fraud scams using the internet.
Victims of the scheme included First American Holding Company and Oklahoma City-based MidFirst Bank. With $34.7 billion in assets, 900,000 accounts, ATMs, full-service banking centers and commercial lending offices across the U.S., MidFirst is one of the largest privately owned banks in the nation.
According to court documents, between December 2011 and January 2017 Solomon Ekunke Okpe, 31, of Lagos, the national capital of Nigeria, and his co-conspirators devised and executed business email compromise, work-from-home, check-cashing, romance, and credit card scams that targeted unsuspecting individuals, banks, and businesses in the United States and elsewhere.
The scam resulted in more than a million dollars in losses to U.S. victims, a U.S. Justice Department report indicates.
To execute the scheme, Okpe and his co-conspirators launched email phishing attacks to steal victim login credentials and other sensitive information, hacked into victim online accounts, impersonated people, and assumed fake identities to defraud individuals, banks and other businesses, and trafficked, possessed, and used stolen credit cards in furtherance of the scheme.
For instance, in BEC scams, Okpe and his co-conspirators posed as trusted individuals in order to deceive banks and companies into making unauthorized wire transfers to bank accounts specified by the co-conspirators. The co-conspirators also falsely posed as online employers on job websites and forums and purported to “hire” individuals in Arizona and elsewhere to positions that were marketed as legitimate.
In reality, these work-from-home “employees” were often unwittingly directed to perform tasks that would facilitate the co-conspirators’ fraud schemes. Some of these tasks included creating bank and payment processing accounts, transferring/withdrawing money from these accounts, or cashing/depositing counterfeit checks.
Okpe and his co-conspirators additionally conducted romance scams by creating accounts on dating websites, feigning interest in romantic relationships with individuals under fictitious identities, and causing these victims to transfer their moneys overseas and/or receive money from wire-transfer scams. Okpe caused and intended to cause individual romance scam victims to suffer tens of thousands of dollars of losses, prosecutors showed.
Okpe was previously arrested in Malaysia at the request of the United States and was detained for more than two years as he contested extradition to the U.S.. He was sentenced on March 27.
One of Okpe’s co-conspirators, Johnson Uke Obogo, was sentenced March 20 to one year and one day in prison in connection with his role in related financial fraud activity.
Senior Counsel Aarash Haghighat of the U.S. Department of Justice Criminal Division’s Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section, and Assistant U.S. Attorney Seth Goertz for the District of Arizona, prosecuted the cases against Okpe and Obogo. The Justice Department’s Office of International Affairs provided significant assistance throughout the investigation and extradition process.
A number of victims have been identified by the FBI, but there is evidence of many more victims that remain unidentified. Anyone who believes they were defrauded by the defendants in this case should contact the Victim Witness Section at the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Arizona.