A Nigerian national has been sentenced to four years in prison for his role in a million-dollar business email scam, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.
Abdulafeez Oluwatoyin Adebiyi, 34, was sentenced by U.S. District Judge Leonie M. Brinkema in the Eastern District of Virginia after pleading guilty to one count of wire fraud.
According to court documents, Adebiyi’s co-conspirators gained access to email exchanges between Company 1 and Company 2 in October 2020, revealing that Company 1 had issued invoices to Company 2 for over a million dollars for work already performed.
Adebiyi then created a phony email account for the president of Company 1 by using a domain name that differed from Company 1’s domain by a single letter. He sent messages to Company 2 falsely claiming that Company 1 had changed bank accounts and provided account and routing numbers for a recently created account controlled by Adebiyi and his co-conspirators.
Company 2 issued a wire transfer of over a million dollars to what they believed was an account for Company 1, but the money was actually distributed through various transactions, including purchases of cryptocurrency and cashier’s checks and additional wire transfers.
The United Kingdom extradited Adebiyi in October 2023, and he was prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorney Seth Schlessinger. The Justice Department’s Office of International Affairs worked with UK authorities to secure the extradition.
Adebiyi’s sentence is a result of a joint investigation by the FBI’s Washington Field Office’s Criminal and Cyber Division, the Electronic Crimes Unit for the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation Office of Inspector General, and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia.
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Key Facts
- State: Virginia
- Agency: DOJ USAO
- Category: Cybercrime|Fraud & Financial Crimes
- Source: Official Source ↗
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