Three Nigerians have been accused by the United States of participating in a $6 million dollar fraud scheme and money laundering.
The three Nigerians are accused of conspiring to commit wire fraud and money laundering in connection with a business email compromise (BEC) scam that resulted in losses of more than $6 million. Kosi Goodness Simon Ebo, 29, James Junior Aliyu, 28, and Henry Onyedikachi Echefu, 31, are the accused defendants.
One of them will be brought before a federal grand jury in Greenbelt, Maryland, on Friday, April 14, after being extradited from Canada.
The defendants were charged in a seven-count indictment for collaborating with others to carry out a BEC scam, according to a statement released on Thursday by the US Department of Justice.
The indictment alleges specifically that the defendants and their co-conspirators, including co-conspirators located in Maryland, obtained unauthorized access to email accounts connected with people and companies that the conspirators had targeted.
It was gathered that the co-conspirators then allegedly sent false wiring instructions to the victims’ email accounts from “spoofed” emails, which are emails with forged sender addresses, to deceive the victims into sending money to bank accounts controlled by perpetrators of the scheme, called “drop accounts”.
The indictment also alleges that the defendants conspired to commit money laundering by disbursing the fraudulently obtained funds in the drop accounts to other accounts by initiating account transfers, withdrawing cash, obtaining cashier’s checks and by writing checks to other individuals and entities, to hide the true ownership and the source of those assets.
If convicted, the defendants each face a maximum sentence of 20 years in federal prison for the wire fraud conspiracy, for the money laundering conspiracy, and for each count of wire fraud, the US justice department said.