A 33-year-old Nigerian man, Olugbenga Lawal, of Indianapolis, Indiana, United States, has been sentenced to 10 years in prison over love scam.
The United States Department of Justice was said to have worked with a crime kingpin in Nigeria to defraud US citizens and businesses of millions of dollars.
They were involved in love scams and email scams.
Lawal and his associates were found to target the elderly with love and defraud them of huge sums of money, laundering the proceeds to banks accounts.
Between January 2019 and June 2020, bank accounts used by Lawal and his co-conspirators to launder money on behalf of the criminal organization received millions of dollars traced directly to individuals and businesses defrauded over the internet.
Accounts Lawal controlled received over N4.32 billion ($3.6m) in deposits between January 2019 and May 2020. Those deposits were spread across seven different bank accounts he opened in his own name or the name of his business entity, Luxe Logistics LLC.
He was said to have also played a role in laundering money for the criminal organization by converting the dollars deposited in his accounts into Nigerian currency accessible in Nigeria.
He engaged in import/export transactions involving the shipment of cars to Nigeria and currency exchange business transactions to facilitate the repatriation of the organization’s fraud proceeds back to Nigeria.
On August 10, 2023, Lawal was convicted by a federal jury of conspiring to commit money laundering.
Three co-conspirators, Michael Hermann, Rita Assane, and Dwight Baines, previously pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit money laundering.
