A 46-year-old man was found guilty of laundering more than $9.5 million amassed via the commission of financial fraud that was enabled by the internet and received a 25-year prison sentence as a result.
Elvis Eghosa Ogiekpolor, of Norcross, Georgia, ran a money-laundering network that set up at least 50 corporate bank accounts to swindle people and companies who had fallen for romance fraud and business email compromise (BEC) schemes out of their money.
In February 2022, a federal grand jury indicted Ogiekpolor on one count of conspiring to commit money laundering and fifteen counts of actual money laundering. The program ran from October 2018 through August 2020.
The U.S. Justice Department (DoJ) claims that Ogiekpolor employed eight “money mules” to register fraudulent bank accounts in the names of fictitious businesses, which were then used to conceal the proceeds of their illegal actions.
These included using false personas to start talks with possible targets on dating websites, then fooling them into wiring money to one of the phony accounts or shipping the cash to the money mules.
According to the DoJ, “Ogiekpolor laundered the funds once the fraud proceeds posted to his accounts, including wiring hundreds of thousands of dollars to overseas accounts, and withdrawing substantial amounts in cash and cashier’s checks.” The scam specifically targeted retired widows and widowers, it added.
A victim business was tricked into paying “many hundreds of thousands of dollars” to what it thought was a “long-standing vendor” in one of the BEC breach cases mentioned by the agency.
BEC attacks are often carried out by sending spear-phishing emails that ask the targeted victims to transfer money to an account under the control of cybercriminals but actually come from a known source that has continuous business relationships with them.
Following the conviction of five of his co-conspirators—all of whom had been charged with conspiring to commit money laundering and had subsequently entered guilty pleas—Ogiekpolor was sentenced.
According to Keri Farley, special agent in charge of FBI Atlanta, “there is no way we can make the victims of Ogiekpolor and this network whole again, but we hope this sentence will at least provide them solace that people are being held accountable.”