A Nigerian fraudster living in Texas previously convicted in a hurricane relief scheme has been indicted in Pittsburgh in a business email compromise fraud that victimized a local mining company of hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Oluseyi Jeremiah Olagoke Adebayo, 48, of Houston, was charged last month under seal with laundering more than $500,000 stolen from a Pittsburgh mining company unidentified in court papers.
The case was unsealed Wednesday when federal agents arrested him in Houston.
Business email compromise cases are on the rise in the U.S., many of them perpetrated by West African cybercriminals. Typically the scammer sends an email that appears to be legitimate from a known source, such as a vendor, and tricks a target into wiring money to a new account because of some purported change in bank accounts.
One such case in Pittsburgh in recent years involved a four-man criminal group originally from West Africa, three of whom were living in Beaver County, Brookline and Duquesne, who sent fake emails to insert themselves into real estate transactions and steal the proceeds of home sales in multiple states.
In the new case, the grand jury said Adebayo conspired with others to launder stolen money from June 2022 through October of that year.
The fraud involves the Pittsburgh mining company and one of its vendors, a trucking firm identified only as Company 2.
On July 18, 2022, the grand jury said, one of the conspirators sent a fraudulent email purportedly from the account of someone named “K.R.” at the trucking company to several people at the mining outfit saying the trucking company’s banking information had changed.
That technique is a classic example of how business compromise emails work.
The bogus email included a new Wells Fargo account number for new payments to be sent by the mining company. Someone at the mining company then replied with instructions on how to access the company’s self-service payment portal, which would allow the fraudster to make direct changes to the trucking company’s payment information.
One of the fraudsters then accessed the self-service portal to change Company 2’s account to the new Wells Fargo account. On July 28, two fraudulent wire payments totaling $132,410 were sent from the mining company to the Wells Fargo account. The criminals later changed the account to a JP Morgan Chase account to send 12 more fraudulent payments from the mining company totaling $420,320.
Agents said the JP Morgan account was opened in Texas by someone named “Anthony Johnson,” who was really Adebayo. The grand jury said he used a fake passport from the Solomon Islands in the name of Anthony Johnson. He also used five other aliases and a series of shell companies to open and maintain bank accounts for the scheme, the indictment says.
Adebayo has a fraud history in Houston. In 2018, he pleaded guilty to a scheme to obtain a fraudulent government loan for damage from Hurricane Irma, which hit the Gulf Coast in September 2017. Prosecutors said Adebayo, who was in the U.S. illegally, used the ID of an Orlando, Fla., resident to get a loan for property damage from the Small Business Association.
Adebayo and others submitted an application for a $118,900 disaster loan for the Florida property, with Adebayo impersonating the homeowner by email and phone.
He showed up at a Houston post office on Feb. 7, 2018, to pick up his check using a counterfeit passport with the ID of the Florida resident. He also had a counterfeit U.S. visa, authorities said.
Adebayo was sentenced to 27 months in prison in that case and got out in 2020.
Torsten covers the courts for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, but he's currently on strike. Reach him at jtorsteno@gmail.com.
