Emmanuel Oluwatosin Kazeem, Multimillion-Dollar Tax Fraud, Maryland 2013

A Baltimore, Maryland, man’s lavish lifestyle has come to an abrupt end, all thanks to a years-long tax fraud scheme orchestrated by none other than Emmanuel Oluwatosin Kazeem.

Today, the U.S. government announced that it has filed a civil denaturalization complaint against Kazeem in the U.S. District Court in Baltimore, Maryland. The complaint seeks to revoke Kazeem’s U.S. citizenship, which he obtained in 2017, after being convicted of 19 counts of mail and wire fraud, aggravated identity theft, and conspiracy to commit mail and wire fraud.

Kazeem, a native of Nigeria, was sentenced to 15 years in prison in 2017. However, then-President Biden commuted his sentence in 2024 after he had served only six years.

The denaturalization complaint alleges that Kazeem’s fraud scheme, which he committed in the years before and after his naturalization, along with his concealment of his crimes, precluded him from obtaining his naturalization lawfully. The complaint also alleges that Kazeem had, prior to his fraud scheme, engaged in a sham marriage to obtain permanent resident status and then married a second woman, further disqualifying him from naturalization.

According to court documents and evidence presented at Kazeem’s criminal trial, the scheme resulted in the conspirators possessing stolen PII of more than 259,000 victims. Kazeem purchased more than 91,000 identities from a Vietnamese hacker that originated from an Oregon company’s private database. The company provided pre-employment and volunteer background checks for thousands of clients.

Kazeem divided the identities into batches and shared them with other co-conspirators. They used the stolen PII to file fraudulent tax returns between 2012 and 2015. In total, Kazeem was linked to 10,139 fraudulent federal tax returns attempting to get over $91 million dollars in refunds and successfully receiving over $11.6 million dollars.

The scheme also involved the use of pre-paid debit cards with the victims’ stolen identities to receive direct electronic tax refund deposits from the IRS. Over 700 of those wire transfers, totaling more than $690,000, were directly linked to Kazeem. Kazeem used the conspiracy windfall to place a nearly $200,000 down payment on a newly constructed house and to purchase a $175,000 townhouse, both in Maryland.

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