Four Years Behind Bars for Prolific BEC Scammer

A Nigerian man has been handed a four-year jail sentence for his function in a multinational prison gang that scammed numerous people and companies over a a number of yr interval.

Solomon Ekunke Okpe, 31, of Lagos, labored with others on enterprise e-mail compromise (BEC), work-from-home, check-cashing, romance and bank card scams designed to trigger losses in extra of $1m.

After being arrested in Malaysia and extradited to Arizona after a two-year authorized battle, Okpe pleaded responsible in December 2022 to conspiracy to commit wire, financial institution and mail fraud.

The BEC schemes sometimes began with a phishing assault to hijack person inboxes. The gang would then e-mail firms doing enterprise with the sufferer, requesting funds to new financial institution accounts beneath its management.

Learn extra about BEC busts: International Police Arrest 65 in Multimillion-Greenback BEC Bust.

The work-from-home scams required the group to pose as on-line employers on job web sites, utilizing fictitious monikers. They might then rent people for legitimate-seeming jobs which had been truly a entrance for extra fraudulent exercise – together with the creation of financial institution and fee accounts, transferring or withdrawing cash from accounts, and cashing or depositing counterfeit checks.

Okpe and his co-conspirators additionally carried out romance scams by creating pretend accounts on courting web sites, participating romantically with their victims then tricking them into both transferring their funds abroad and/or receiving cash from wire-transfer scams.

Okpe stole tens of 1000’s of {dollars} from some victims, in accordance with the Division of Justice (DoJ).

One co-conspirator, Johnson Uke Obogo, was extradited from the UK and sentenced on March 20 to 1 yr and in the future in jail for his function within the fraud operation.

The fraud schemes ran from December 2011 to January 2017.

In accordance with the FBI, BEC scams made cyber-criminals over $2.7bn final yr, whereas romance scams had been one other excessive earner, leading to sufferer losses of practically $736m.