The day after his 29th birthday in May, Olalekan Jacob Ponle posted a picture on his Instagram standing next to a bright yellow Lamborghini in Dubai.
“Stop letting
people make you feel guilty for the wealth you’ve acquired,” he
admonished, wearing designer jewellery and Gucci clothes from head to toe.
A month later, the
Nigerian, who goes by the name “mrwoodbery” on Instagram, was
arrested by Dubai Police for alleged money laundering and cyber fraud.
The most famous of
the dozen Africans nabbed in the dramatic operation was 37-year-old Ramon
Olorunwa Abbas, “hushpuppi” or just “hush” as he was known
by his 2.4 million Instagram followers.
Police in the emirate
say they recovered $40m (Ksh4.3 billion) in cash, 13 luxury cars worth $6.8m
(Ksh727.7 million), 21 computers, 47 smartphones and the addresses of nearly
two million alleged victims.
Mr Abbas and Mr
Ponle were both extradited to the US and charged in a Chicago court with
conspiracy to commit wire fraud and laundering hundreds of millions of dollars
obtained from cybercrimes.
The two have not yet
been asked to plead and are presumed innocent until proven guilty.
“I think
there’s probably a certain arrogance when they believe they’ve been careful
about maintaining anonymity in their online identities, but they live high on
the hog and get careless on social media,” said Glen Donath, a former
senior prosecutor in the US Attorney’s Office in Washington, DC.
It is a spectacular
crash for the two Nigerian men who extensively documented their high-flying
lifestyle on social media, raising questions about the sources of their wealth.
They unwittingly
provided crucial information about their identities and activities for American
detectives with their Instagram and Snapchat posts.
They are accused of
impersonating legitimate employees of various US companies in “business
email compromise” (BEC) schemes and tricking the recipients into wiring
millions of dollars into their own accounts.
On Instagram,
hushpuppi said he was a real estate developer and had a category of videos
called “Flexing” – social media lingo for showing off. But the
“houses” were actually a codeword for bank accounts “used to
receive proceeds of a fraudulent scheme”, investigators allege.
“Our value
system in Nigeria needs to be checked, especially the emphasis we place on
wealth, no matter how you got it,” the economist Ebuka Emebinah told the
BBC from New York.
“It’s a culture
where people believe that results speak for you. We don’t place as much
emphasis on the process and this has built up over time.”
In April, hushpuppi
renewed his lease for another year at the exclusive Palazzo Versace apartments
in Dubai under his real name and phone number.
“Thank you,
Lord, for the many blessings in my life. Continue to shame those waiting for me
to be shamed,” he captioned an Instagram picture of a Rolls-Royce just a
fortnight before he was arrested.
“Abbas finances
this opulent lifestyle through crime, and he is one of the leaders of a
transnational network that facilitates computer intrusions, fraudulent schemes
(including BEC schemes), and money laundering, targeting victims around the
world in schemes designed to steal hundreds of millions of dollars,” the
Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) said in an affidavit.
In one case, a
foreign financial institution allegedly lost $14.7m (Ksh1.6 billion) in a
cyber-heist where the money ended up in hushpuppi’s bank accounts in multiple
countries.
The affidavit also
alleged that he was involved in a scheme to steal $124m (Ksh13.3 billion) from
an unnamed English Premier League team.
The FBI obtained records
from his Google, Apple iCloud, Instagram and Snapchat accounts which allegedly
contained banking information, passports, communication with conspirators and
records of wire transfers.
About 90% of
business email compromise scams originate in West Africa, research from
American email security firm Agari shows.
The complaint
against Mr Abbas and Mr Ponle describe tactics that resemble what the company
calls Vendor Email Compromise tactics, where scammers compromise an email
account and study communication between a customer and a vendor.
“The scammer
would gather contextual details, as they watched the legitimate email
flow,” explains Crane Hassold, Agari’s senior director of threat research.
“The bad actor
would redirect emails to the bad actor’s email account, craft emails to the
customer that looked like they are coming from the vendor, indicate that the
‘vendor’ had a new bank account, provide ‘updated’ bank account information and
the money would be gone, at that point.”
Mr Ponle, known
online as “mrwoodberry”, used Mark Kain in emails, according to the
FBI.
He is accused of
defrauding a Chicago-based company into sending wire transfers of $15.2m
(Ksh1.6 billion). Companies in Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, New York, and California
are also said to have fallen victim.
The cash trail
allegedly disappeared after his accomplices, called money mules, converted the
money into the cryptocurrency bitcoin.
Email scams have
become so prevalent globally, and so deeply linked to Nigeria, that the
fraudsters have a name in the country: “Yahoo boys”.
They try to convince
a recipient to wire money to the other side of the world or they go
“phishing”, stealing a user’s identity and personal information for
fraud.
The FBI warns
against the Nigerian letter or “419” fraud – emails promising large
sums of money, called advance fee scams. The “Nigerian prince” trope
has become shorthand for deception.
- An
individual may contact you via e-mail, explaining he needs help to transfer
money.
- Will
tell you that political turmoil or a natural disaster makes it difficult for
him to make the transfer.
- Will ask
you to give him your financial details so that he can transfer the money into
your account.
- This
allows him to access and steal from your account.
- Be
careful what you post on social media and dating sites as scammers use the
details to better understand you and target you.
A Washington,
DC-based attorney, Moe Odele, finds it frustrating as a Nigerian because it
ignores the “systemic failures that have led to brilliant Nigerian youths
engaging in these scams”, in the country and abroad.
“They see it as
an easy way out in a country that offers them limited options and, in many
cases, no options at all,” she says.
“But there are
also many brilliant Nigerians are represented in world stages from education to
pop culture.”
Last month, the US
Treasury Department blacklisted six Nigerians among 79 individuals and
organisations in its Most Wanted cybercriminals list. It accused them of
stealing more than $6m from American citizens through deceptive global threats
like BEC and romance fraud.
Ayo Bankole
Akintujoye – founder of Nigeria-based Bootcamp, a start-up incubation
initiative – faults the international attention on Nigeria alone.
“A lot of
Nigerians are doing fantastic things all over the world, but they don’t get as
much media mileage as the guys doing bad things. It affects all the guys doing
legitimate stuff especially in the tech space,” he said.
“A lot of
foreign companies don’t ship to Nigeria, many payment platforms don’t accept
payments from us because it has ruined our image.”
In its internet
crime report for 2019, the FBI said it had received more than 460,000
complaints of suspected cyber fraud, with losses of more than $3.5bn (Ksh374.6
billion) reported. More than $300m (Ksh32.1 billion) was recovered, it said.
However, many online
fraudsters don’t get caught and even fewer end up going to jail.
Mr Donath says the
cases are challenging because they happen overseas and tend to be quite
sophisticated.
“They’re
time-consuming, highly document-intensive, and in many federal criminal cases,
you have the difficulty of walking a jury through a chronology of relevant
facts,” said the partner at law firm Clifford Chance.
If convicted, Mr
Abbas and Mr Ponle could be locked up for up to 20 years.
