A dual British-Nigerian citizen who posed online and via email as US contractor employees to defraud project owners will spend seven years in prison, a federal judge in North Carolina ruled on 1 October Prosecutors say the scheme netted $14 million, which could have been much higher if the suspicious banking activity had gone unnoticed.
Oludayo Kolawole John Adeagbo, 45, was a leader in a conspiracy to commit wire fraud and launder stolen funds through what authorities call a business email compromise scheme, or BEC, according to prosecutors. The schemes often use fake but real-looking email addresses to redirect billed funds.
Adeagbo and the others signed up for an account with a construction project data aggregator and purchased information related to dozens of projects, including the names of owners and contractors and contract amounts. They used the information to target victims, usually public entities such as universities and local governments, posing as contractors or other vendors.
In one example highlighted by prosecutors, Adeagbo registered the domain rodgersbuildersinc.com to impersonate Rodgers Builders, which has an actual website at rodgersbuilders.com. The contractor was working on a project for Appalachian State University in North Carolina, and the scammers used an email at their fake domain with the name of a real Rodgers employee to ask a university employee to update your bank information to a new account.
A few days later, the university processed a $1.9 million payment for Rodgers and directed the money into the fraudsters’ account.
“Adeagbo ran a sophisticated 21st-century cybercriminal operation that hid behind fake email accounts and anonymous Internet addresses to rob the innocent,” Alamdar Hamdani, the U.S. Attorney for South Texas, said in a communicated
Scammers defrauded more than 30 city governments, colleges and other entities, and unsuccessfully targeted dozens more. Victims tried to transfer more than $48 million in total, though banks stopped the suspicious transactions and authorities recovering funds before they left the country took most of them. Still, prosecutors wrote in a court filing that “the scheme was outrageously successful, even when considering similar BEC schemes.”
Prosecutors could not say exactly how much Adeagbo personally profited from the scheme, but his online presence showed he bought items such as luxury vehicles and expensive watches. He was extradited from the UK in 2022.
In addition to the prison sentence, U.S. District Court Judge Kenneth Bell sentenced Adeagbo to one year of supervised release and ordered him to repay more than $900,000 in restitution. A lawyer representing Adeagbo did not immediately respond to inquiries.
BEC scams are a growing problem. According to the FBI, annual losses from these scams have increased from $1.2 billion in 2018 to $2.9 billion last year. Anyone who suspects they may have been a victim of a BEC scheme can report it to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center at bec.ic3.gov.
“BEC is one of the fastest growing and most expensive scams and the only way to combat it is through cooperation, often international cooperation, and this case is an excellent example of collaborations that work” , FBI Executive Assistant Director Michael Nordwall said in a statement.
A second fraudster involved in the scheme, Donald Ikenna Echeazu, 42, was sentenced last year to 18 months in prison and ordered to pay more than $655,000 in restitution. A third man, Olabanji Oladotun Egbinola, that prosecutors previously linked to the schemahe was sentenced last year to four years in prison and ordered to pay nearly $470,000 in restitution.
