United States authorities Friday said an English Premier League club was
among the victims, Nigerian fraudster Ramon Olorunwa Abbas, also known
as Hushpuppi, conspired to defraud.
US Department of Justice said Hushpuppi will face criminal charges,
alleging he conspired to launder hundreds of millions of dollars from
business email compromise (BEC) frauds and other scams, including
schemes targeting a U.S. law firm, a foreign bank and an unnamed English
Premier League soccer club.
“Abbas and others further conspired to launder hundreds of millions of
dollars from other fraudulent schemes and computer intrusions, including
one scheme to steal £100 million (approximately $124
million) from an English Premier League soccer club, the complaint
alleges,” the Department of Justice said in a statement on Friday.
Abbas, popularly known as Huspuppi was arrested earlier in June along
with Olalekan Jacob Ponle, also known as Woodberry and 10 others.
The 12 suspects were arrested in six simultaneous raids carried out by the e-police unit of the Dubai Police.
The gang was responsible for Dh1.6 billion (about N169 billion) fraud
involving over 1.9 million victims. Items worth N15.845 billion (Dh 150
million) were also seized.
13 luxury cars worth N2. 640 billion (Dh 25 million), 21 laptops, 47
smartphones, 15 memory storage devices, 5 external hard drives and 800,
000 emails of potential victims were also recovered from the gang.
Their arrest in an operation codenamed Fox Hunt 2 came after about four
months of painstaking investigations into their activities., during
which their social media activities were monitored by the highly trained
police unit.
The video posted by the Dubai Media Office said their police were able
to track the locations of the suspected fraudsters using their social
media activities.
The Dubai Police said the Hushpuppi and his gang specialised in hacking
corporate emails and then send fictitious messages to the clients of the
companies whose email accounts they have hacked to redirect financial
transactions and bank details to their own accounts.
“This was a challenging case, one that spanned international boundaries,
traditional financial systems and the digital sphere,” said Jesse
Baker, Special Agent in Charge of the United States Secret Service, Los
Angles Field Office.
The DoJ affidavit alleges that Abbas and others committed a BEC scheme
that defrauded a client of a New York-based law firm out of
approximately $922,857 in October 2019.
DoJ said Abbas and co-conspirators allegedly tricked one of the law
firm’s paralegals into wiring money intended for the client’s real
estate refinancing to a bank account that was controlled by Abbas and
the co-conspirators.
The Dubai Police said he and Woodberry were extradited to the United
States this week to face charges of money laundering. If convicted,
Hushpuppi would face a statutory maximum sentence of 20 years in federal
prison.
