US Authorities charge three Nigerians with $6 million fraud

The defendants are accused of colluding with others to carry out a BEC scam in the seven-count indictment.

Three Nigerians have been accused by the US with money laundering and a fraud operation that cost more than $6 million.

Kosi Goodness Simon-Ebo, 29, James Junior Aliyu, 28, and Henry Onyedikachi Echefu, 31, are accused of conspiring to commit wire fraud and money laundering in connection with a business email compromise (BEC) scheme that resulted in losses of more than $6 million.

On Friday, April 14, one of them will be brought before a federal grand jury in Greenbelt, Maryland, after being extradited from Canada.

The defendants are charged in a seven-count indictment for collaborating with others to carry out a BEC scam, according to a statement released on Thursday by the US Department of Justice.

The indictment claims that the defendants and their co-conspirators, including co-conspirators residing in Maryland, obtained unauthorised access to email accounts connected with people and companies that the conspirators had targeted.

In order to trick the victims into sending money to bank accounts run by the scheme’s perpetrators, known as “drop accounts,” the co-conspirators allegedly sent false wiring instructions to the victims’ email accounts using “spoofed” emails, which are emails with forged sender addresses.

The indictment further claims that the defendants conspired to commit money laundering by transferring the fraudulently obtained funds in the drop accounts to other accounts by initiating account transfers, withdrawing cash, obtaining cashier’s checks, and writing checks to other people and entities in order to conceal the true ownership and the source of those assets.

According to the US justice department, the defendants could receive a maximum sentence of 20 years in federal prison if found guilty of the conspiracy to commit wire fraud, the conspiracy to commit money laundering, and each count of wire fraud.