How the US caught flashy Nigerian Instagrammers
“Stop letting people make you feel guilty for the wealth
you’ve acquired,” he admonished, wearing designer jewellery and Gucci clothes
from head to toe.
A month later, the Nigerian, who goes by the name
“mrwoodbery” on Instagram, was arrested by Dubai Police for alleged money
laundering and cyber fraud.
The most famous of the dozen Africans nabbed in the dramatic
operation was 37-year-old Ramon Olorunwa Abbas, “hushpuppi” or just “hush” as
he was known by his 2.4 million Instagram followers.
Police in the emirate say they recovered $40m (£32m) in
cash, 13 luxury cars worth $6.8m, 21 computers, 47 smartphones and the
addresses of nearly two million alleged victims.
Mr Abbas and Mr Ponle were both extradited to the US and
charged in a Chicago court with conspiracy to commit wire fraud and laundering
hundreds of millions of dollars obtained from cybercrimes.
The two have not yet been asked to plead and are presumed
innocent until proven guilty.
“I think there’s probably a certain arrogance when they
believe they’ve been careful about maintaining anonymity in their online
identities, but they live high on the hog and get careless on social media,”
said Glen Donath, a former senior prosecutor in the US Attorney’s Office in
Washington, DC.
It is a spectacular crash for the two Nigerian men who
extensively documented their high-flying lifestyle on social media, raising
questions about the sources of their wealth.
They unwittingly provided crucial information about their
identities and activities for American detectives with their Instagram and
Snapchat posts.
They are accused of impersonating legitimate employees of
various US companies in “business email compromise” (BEC) schemes and tricking
the recipients into wiring millions of dollars into their own accounts.
On Instagram, hushpuppi said he was a real estate developer
and had a category of videos called “Flexing” – social media lingo for showing
off. But the “houses” were actually a codeword for bank accounts “used to
receive proceeds of a fraudulent scheme”, investigators allege.
“Our value system in Nigeria needs to be checked, especially
the emphasis we place on wealth, no matter how you got it,” the economist Ebuka
Emebinah told the BBC from New York.
“It’s a culture where people believe that results speak for
you. We don’t place as much emphasis on the process and this has built up over
time.”
English Premier League team targeted
In April, hushpuppi renewed his lease for another year at
the exclusive Palazzo Versace apartments in Dubai under his real name and phone
number.
“Thank you, Lord, for the many blessings in my life.
Continue to shame those waiting for me to be shamed,” he captioned an Instagram
picture of a Rolls-Royce just a fortnight before he was arrested.
“Abbas finances this opulent lifestyle through crime, and he
is one of the leaders of a transnational network that facilitates computer
intrusions, fraudulent schemes (including BEC schemes), and money laundering,
targeting victims around the world in schemes designed to steal hundreds of
millions of dollars,” the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) said in an
affidavit.
In one case, a foreign financial institution allegedly lost
$14.7m in a cyber-heist where the money ended up in hushpuppi’s bank accounts
in multiple countries.
The affidavit also alleged that he was involved in a scheme
to steal $124m from an unnamed English Premier League team.
The FBI obtained records from his Google, Apple iCloud,
Instagram and Snapchat accounts which allegedly contained banking information,
passports, communication with conspirators and records of wire transfers.
About 90% of business email compromise scams originate in
West Africa, research from American email security firm Agari shows.
‘Yahoo boys’
The complaint against Mr Abbas and Mr Ponle describe tactics
that resemble what the company calls Vendor Email Compromise tactics, where
scammers compromise an email account and study communication between a customer
and a vendor.
“The scammer would gather contextual details, as they
watched the legitimate email flow,” explains Crane Hassold, Agari’s senior
director of threat research.
“The bad actor would redirect emails to the bad actor’s
email account, craft emails to the customer that looked like they are coming
from the vendor, indicate that the ‘vendor’ had a new bank account, provide
‘updated’ bank account information and the money would be gone, at that point.”
Mr Ponle, known online as “mrwoodberry”, used Mark Kain in
emails, according to the FBI.
He is accused of defrauding a Chicago-based company into
sending wire transfers of $15.2m. Companies in Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, New
York, and California are also said to have fallen victim.
The cash trail allegedly disappeared after his accomplices,
called money mules, converted the money into the cryptocurrency bitcoin.
Email scams have become so prevalent globally, and so deeply
linked to Nigeria, that the fraudsters have a name in the country: “Yahoo
boys”.
They try to convince a recipient to wire money to the other
side of the world or they go “phishing”, stealing a user’s identity and
personal information for fraud.
The FBI warns against the Nigerian letter or “419” fraud –
emails promising large sums of money, called advance fee scams. The “Nigerian
prince” trope has become shorthand for deception.
A Washington, DC-based attorney, Moe Odele, finds it
frustrating as a Nigerian because it ignores the “systemic failures that have
led to brilliant Nigerian youths engaging in these scams”, in the country and
abroad.
“They see it as an easy way out in a country that offers
them limited options and, in many cases, no options at all,” she says.
“But there are also many brilliant Nigerians are represented
in world stages from education to pop culture.”
How Nigeria suffers
Last month, the US Treasury Department blacklisted six
Nigerians among 79 individuals and organisations in its Most Wanted
cybercriminals list. It accused them of stealing more than $6m from American
citizens through deceptive global threats like BEC and romance fraud.
Ayo Bankole Akintujoye – founder of Nigeria-based Bootcamp,
a start-up incubation initiative – faults the international attention on
Nigeria alone.
“A lot of Nigerians are doing fantastic things all over the
world, but they don’t get as much media mileage as the guys doing bad things.
It affects all the guys doing legitimate stuff especially in the tech space,”
he said.
“A lot of foreign companies don’t ship to Nigeria, many
payment platforms don’t accept payments from us because it has ruined our
image.”
In its internet crime report for 2019 , the FBI said it had
received more than 460,000 complaints of suspected cyber fraud, with losses of
more than $3.5bn reported. More than $300m was recovered, it said.
However, many online fraudsters don’t get caught and even
fewer end up going to jail.
Mr Donath says the cases are challenging because they happen
overseas and tend to be quite sophisticated.
“They’re time-consuming, highly document-intensive, and in
many federal criminal cases, you have the difficulty of walking a jury through
a chronology of relevant facts,” said the partner at law firm Clifford Chance.
If convicted, Mr Abbas and Mr Ponle could be locked up for
up to 20 years.
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