Lazy Man's Road To Riches

Ramon Abbas aka "Hushpuppi" started out in crime as a *"Yahoo boy" which is the Nigerian term for men who commit 'romance' fraud .....

Ramon Abbas aka Hushpuppi
'Flexing' His Ill Gotten Gains

 .... by stealing other people's identities online, and swindling mostly foreign women out of money.

He then moved on to bigger and more lucrative Business Email Compromise (BEC) scams after moving to Malaysia, and ending up in Kuala Lumpur around 2014, before then moving to Dubai in 2017.

He then started describing himself on-line as a so-called "Billionaire Gucci Master," along with gaining 2.5 million Instagram admirers and followers (presumably mostly African), by posting 'flexing videos' (showing off money, clothes, cars etc). BEC was now his main income source, along with money laundering. BEC works by intercepting legitimate payments, via fake emails that appear to come from an email address that is almost exactly the same as the legitimate supplier's (usually only a single letter or number will be different).;

In that fake email, the scammers - posing as a legitimate supplier awaiting payment - typically say they've switched banks, so the payment will need to be wired to a different account; the details for which they will then provide. The accounts clerk is fooled into thinking it is a legitimate request from the supplier - and, with a single click of a mouse, vast sums of money are posted to a scam account where its quickly moved or used to buy watches, cars etc as a means of laundering the money.

In 2022 he was jailed for more than 11 years in the US, for his role in an international fraud syndicate, in which Abbas's resorted to straight-up identity theft when he assumed the identity of a New York banker to entrap his victim, a Qatari businessperson seeking a $15m loan to build a new school in the Gulf state. Between December 2019 and February 2020, Abbas and a gang of alleged middlemen in Kenya, Nigeria and the US, groomed and conned the victim out of more than a million dollars. Some of it was laundered via the purchase of a watch worth $230,000.

The sentence was given, even after two Nigerian imams allegedly wrote to the judge in Los Angeles appealing for leniency, saying he regularly helped out widows and orphans, as well as donating to things like feeding programmes ...... the fact that he stole millions was of no concern to the Imams. There is no shame in stealing from us non Muslims.

His business email compromise scams (that cumulatively caused more than $24 million in losses in the US alone), online bank heists and other cyber-enabled fraud financially ruined scores of victims worldwide, and also provided assistance to the North Korean regime, after he tried to launder €13m stolen by a gang of North Korean hackers from the Maltese Bank of Valletta (The bank said it managed to recover only 10m euros) ... so he and the gang got away with €3m. 

Abba Kyari - From Nigeria's Super Cop To Criminals Associate

He was aided in much of this by corrupt Nigerian police officer Abba Kyari aka Nigeria's "super cop," who has since  been suspended from duty, and is also wanted in the US on charges of fraud, money laundering and identity theft. He denies all charges and is resisting any attempts to deport him to the US.

Obinwanne Okeke aka Invictus Obi

Another much admired Nigerian, Obinwanne Okeke aka Invictus Obi, is a well known young entrepreneur and now convicted fraudster, who is currently serving a ten-year prison sentence in the United States for internet fraud that caused $11M losses to his victims. He holds a master's degree in International business and Counter-terrorism from Monash University, Australia, while his 'Invictus Group' operated in three African countries including Nigeria, South Africa, and Zambia with investments in oil and gas, agriculture, private equity, alternative energy, telecom and real estate.

But all this was funded via BEC fraud .... He eventually pleaded guilty in the US courts (to avoid a possible 30 year sentence), to two counts of computer fraud and wire fraud in which he and his syndicates had defrauded American citizens up to $11m through fraudulent wire transfer instructions in a massive, coordinated, business e-mail compromise scheme. 

Mr Okeke had used phishing emails to gain unauthorised access to the email account of the CFO of Unatrac Holding Limited, the UK Export Sales office for Mantrac Group, a subsidiary of American construction and mining equipment manufacturer Caterpillar Inc. He then used this email address over 464 times to authorise payments to accounts associated with Okeke making approximately 15 transfers between April 11 to 19, 2018 totalling $11m.

Frankly the sentences seems light to me, as many young Nigerians looked to them as role models, and now consider Internet scamming as a career path, and a valid source of income, and there are even trainers on how to become a "Yahoo boy" in Nigeria. In May 2019, Nigeria's anti-corruption agency, the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), raided a "Yahoo Yahoo training school" in the commercial capital Lagos, arresting the proprietor, and the eight 'students' who were allegedly being taught skills to carry out cyber romance and BEC fraud. But this is just the tip of a titanic sinking size  iceberg of criminal activity in Nigeria.

*Incidentally they are called "Yahoo boys" because Yahoo provided the first free email addresses in Nigeria and this allowed the first primitive (but successful because of westerners greed) Advance-fee scam aka the 419 scams to be  launched.