Two Nigerians are in trouble in the United States after being indicted by prosecutors for running a fraudulent bitcoin investment scheme.
\nThe Nigerians, Onwuemerie Ogor Gift and Kelvin Usifoh, were charged by Oregon District Attorney\u2019s Office with 11 counts of wire fraud, as well as conspiracy to commit wire fraud and money laundering, according to\u00a0a report.
\nJust Thursday, it emerged that nine Nigerians had been arrested in the United States for allegedly defrauding individuals and businesses of more than $3.5 million.
\nGeoffrey S. Berman, the United States attorney for the southern district of New York, and James C. Spero, special agent in charge of the Tampa, Florida, field office of U.S. immigration and customs enforcement\u2019s Homeland security investigations (\u201cHSI\u201d), disclosed this in a statement on Thursday.
\nFrom December 2017 to June 2018, Gift and Usifoh allegedly promoted the fake bitcoin investment scheme via three websites wealthcurrency.com,\u00a0 boomcurrency.com\u00a0and\u00a0merrycurrency.com\u00a0\u2013 promising investors 20\u201350 percent risk-free returns with instant withdrawals.
\nGift and Usifoh falsely claimed that victims\u2019 bitcoins would be invested using \u201cunique trading methods\u201d and that they would maintain a \u201cconstant high interest rate.\u201d The pair also allegedly encouraged investors to transfer bitcoin to their own cryptocurrency wallets. Once transferred, Gift and Usifoh would exchange it for Nigerian naira.
\nIn over six months, the defendants stole 10.88 bitcoins (worth approximately $56,391 at press time) from three victims, one residing in Oregon and two in California, according to the indictment. They also used a photo of a fourth victim to promote their scheme.
\nIn total, the prosecutors alleged that Gift and Usifoh received more than 50 bitcoins ($259,000) through the scam.
\nLargely due to their pseudonymous, online nature, cryptocurrencies are becoming increasingly popular as a means to scam investors. But law enforcement is catching up.
\nLast month, New York prosecutors charged a man in a nine-count indictment for duping investors out of over $200,000 in cryptocurrency and cash. And, in February, a 20-year-old man was indicted in the New York Supreme Court over SIM-swapping identity and crypto theft.
\nWarning cryptocurrency investors over such schemes, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission jointly issued an alert earlier this week, saying that claims such as \u201crisk-free\u201d, \u201cabsolutely safe\u201d and \u201cguaranteed profit\u201d are hallmarks of a fraud.
\nThe suspects in the $3.5 million scam are Oluwaseun Adelekan, Olalekan Daramola, Solomon Aburekhanlen, Gbenga Oyeneyin, Abiola Olajumoke, Temitope Omotayo, Bryan Eadie, Albert Lucas and Ademola Adebogun.
\nThe US officials said the suspects allegedly committed the fraud through business email compromises, a Russian oil scam, and a romance scam.
\n\u201cAs alleged, these defendants deployed three different email schemes to defraud their victims.\u00a0 The common denominator in all three schemes was the defendants\u2019 alleged fleecing of their victims through fictitious online identities,\u201d said Berman.
\n\u201cThe schemes allegedly earned the defendants $3.5 million \u2013 and also arrests on federal felony charges.\u201d
\nThe defendants are accused of participating in a scheme to defraud businesses and individuals through several categories of false and misleading representations.
\n\u201cSending victims email messages that appeared to be, but were not, from legitimate business counterparties that included instructions to the victims to wire payment to those seemingly legitimate business counterparties into bank accounts that were actually under the control of, and\/or maintained by, Adelekan, Daramola, Aburekhanlen, Oyeneyin, Olajumoke, Omotayo, Eadie, Lucas, and Adebogun (the \u201cBusiness Email Compromise Scam\u201d),\u201d read the statement.
\n\u201cSending email messages and text messages to at least one victim offering an opportunity to invest in oil stored in Russian oil tank farms conditioned on that victim wiring upfront payments into bank accounts purportedly affiliated with the purported oil investment but actually opened by and under the control of Aburekhanlen, Olajumoke, and Oyeneyin (the \u201cRussian Oil Scam\u201d).
\n\u201cSending email messages and text messages to at least one victim from an individual (or individuals) purporting to be a female with romantic intentions toward the victim requesting, further to establishing a romantic relationship, the wiring of payment into a bank account under the control of Omotayo (the \u201cRomance Scam\u201d).\u201d
\nThey are each charged in the indictment with one count of conspiring to commit wire fraud and each defendant faces a maximum potential sentence of 20 years in prison<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Two Nigerians are in trouble in the United States after being indicted by prosecutors for running a fraudulent bitcoin investment scheme. The Nigerians, Onwuemerie Ogor Gift and Kelvin Usifoh, were charged by Oregon District Attorney\u2019s Office with 11 counts of wire fraud, as well as conspiracy to commit wire fraud and money laundering, according to\u00a0a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":17286,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17289","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/everyday.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17289","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/everyday.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/everyday.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/everyday.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/everyday.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=17289"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/everyday.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17289\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/everyday.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=17289"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/everyday.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=17289"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/everyday.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=17289"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}