The arrest of Abidemi Rufai, a Senior Special Assistant to Ogun State Governor, Dapo Abiodun, over an alleged $350,000 employment fraud by the United States’ Federal Bureau of Investigation has exposed how much progress has been made in detecting evolving internet fraud.
Rufai, a flamboyant property merchant and owner of Ecobet Sport Betting in Nigeria was arrested Friday evening at JFK Airport in New York on a criminal complaint charging him with wire fraud for his scheme to steal over $350,000 in unemployment benefits from the Washington State Employment Security Department, announced Acting US’s Attorney Tessa Gorman.
According to Gorman, Rufai, a.k.a Sandy Tang, used the stolen identities of more than 100 Washington residents to file fraudulent claims with the Washington Employment Security Department for pandemic-related unemployment benefits and tried to pull the same scheme in six other states.
“Rufai also filed fraudulent unemployment claims with Hawaii, Wyoming, Massachusetts, Montana, New York, and Pennsylvania. Rufai used variations of a single e-mail address in a manner intended to evade automatic detection by fraud systems. By using this practice, Rufai made it appear that each claim was connected with a different email account,” Gorman said.
The criminal complaint also said Rufai mailed some of the proceeds of his fraud to the Jamaica and New York addresses of his relatives with more than $288,000 deposits between March and August 2020.
His arrest comes almost a year after officials announced they were temporarily suspending unemployment benefits payments after discovering that criminals had used stolen Social Security numbers and other personal information to file bogus claims for federal and state unemployment benefits.
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The unsealed indictment shows the evolving tactics of online fraudsters which has seen them continue to dupe unwitting victims just like Obinwanne Okeke, a.k.a Invictus Obi, a trans-Atlantic cybercriminal, jailed for 10 years for cyber-related crimes and Ramon Abbas, a.k.a Hushpuppi, despite numerous awareness campaigns about the online scams.
In the past, internet scams associated with Nigerians (known locally as “Yahoo Boys”) were dominated by romance scams through dating sites as well as phony email business propositions from infamous “Nigerian princes,” but their current tactics appear to have changed.
However, things have evolved; through business email compromise scams (BEC), fraudsters use hacked email accounts to convince businesses or individuals to make payments that are either bogus or similar to actual payments owed to legitimate companies.
“Greed is a powerful motivator. Unfortunately, the greed alleged to this defendant (Sandy Tang) affects all taxpayers,” said Donald Voiret, Special Agent in Charge FBI Seattle. “The FBI and our partners will not stand idly by while individuals attempt to defraud programs meant to assist American workers and families suffering the consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic.”
The cases are being prosecuted by Assistant United States Attorneys Seth Wilkinson, Cindy Chang, and Benjamin Diggs of the Western District of Washington, and Trial Attorney Jane Lee of DOJ’s Cyber Crime and Intellectual Property Section (CCIPS).
Beyond the arrests that have already been made, the US is working with foreign counterparts to arrest more indicted subjects. And citing previous success with extraditing Nigerian citizens to the US in the past, US district attorney Nicola Hanna says the US will seek to extradite indicted defendants believed to be in Nigeria.
The defendants face charges ranging from money laundering to identity theft and will likely face “decades in federal prisons” if convicted.
But that’s likely all the justice victims will ever get. “A large majority of victims do not get their money back ever,” Hanna noted during the briefing.
Alongside the FBI’s investigations to deal with the scams, Hanna emphasized the need to educate potential targets about contemporary fraud tactics to prevent the scams at source. In his words: “We cannot arrest our way out of this problem.”
Bad rep
The high-profile arrests have also triggered extreme reactions among Nigerians at home and abroad, many of whom daily experience the cost of national stereotyping that comes with the well-covered activity of online fraudsters, particularly with the widespread of email scam attempts.
These costs range from increased scrutiny for visa processes, a lack of trust when attempting to do business internationally and being restricted from using international payment platforms.
The fraud stereotype is also often pushed back as an unfair generalization, with successes within Nigeria’s startup and tech ecosystem cited as contrary evidence. A few have even claimed the international criminal behavior is no more than a “hustle”.
