Nigerian Yahoo Boy found guilty of $7M fraud in US

A Nigerian fraudster, Emmanuel Oluwatosin Kazeem, has been found guilty of defrauding taxpayers in the United States to the tune of $7 million and would be sentenced in November 2017, Oregon Live, a US based media outlet reports.

The 34-year-old Kazeem who was accused of obtaining more than 125,000 stolen taxpayer identities from across the United States, was found guilty on 19 counts of mail and wire fraud, aggravated identity theft and conspiracy to commit mail and wire fraud, by a Federal Court sitting in Oregon.

A jury in Medford returned the verdicts against Kazeem who lived most recently in Bowie, Maryland.

Prosecutors told the court that Kazeem bought over 91,000 of the identities from a Vietnamese hacker who got into a database belonging to an Oregon company called CICS Employment Services.

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Most of the personal information belonged to people living in Oregon and Washington and were used to file fraudulent tax returns between 2012 and 2015. Over 2,800 fraudulent returns were linked to Kazeem with attempted refunds in excess of $26 million and actual losses to the US government of nearly $7 million.

IRS criminal investigators traced more than 2,000 wire transfers involving $2.1 million dollars in fraudulent tax refunds wired to Nigeria by Kazeem and his team of fraudsters.

It was learned that Kazeem had passed many of the identities to his gang members located in the Atlanta, Georgia, and Nigeria after instructing them on how to use the stolen personal information to get electronic filing PINs from the Internal Revenue Service in the taxpayers’ names to file tax returns.

He was said to have taught them how to create fictitious W-2 wage documents, acquire and register prepaid debit cards in the taxpayers’ names to receive refunds.

Prosecutors also submitted evidence that Kazeem had invested more than $190,000 in cash into the recent purchase of a newly constructed home in Maryland, used $175,000 in cash to buy a town house in Maryland shortly before his arrest.

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Investigations also revealed that he had wired over $8,300 in monthly credit card payments to Nigeria and also had started constructing a hotel in Lagos.

The trial lasted five days before US District Judge Ann L. Aiken, found Kazeem and is scheduled to be sentenced in Medford on November 8, 2017, and could face a long stretch in prison.