A Nigerian fraudster known as ‘Hushpuppi’ on Instagram had been convicted to 11 years imprisonment after he plotted to launder millions of dollars collected from cybercrimes, including business email compromise (BEC) scams.
With his real name Ramon Olorunwa Abbas, Hushpuppi must pay $1,732,841 to two confirmed victims, both large organisations from the US and Qatar.
The interrogation of the Nigerian fraudster showed that he had conspired to launder more than $300 million worth of cybercrime profit between 2019 and 2022. Hushpuppi was tagged as one of the world’s most prolific money launderers, targeting victims from the US and other countries.
Hushpuppi also admitted to working for North Korean threat groups attempting to steal funds from European banking institutions.
The Nigerian national became an Instagram influencer, boasting a luxurious lifestyle while hiding behind his fraudster background.
Because of his gained influencer persona on social media, particularly Instagram, Hushpuppi leveraged it to aid his social engineering tactics against targeted victims. In June 2020, the Nigerian fraudster was arrested in Dubai and charged with money laundering schemes in April 2021.
The DoJ stated that Hushpuppi’s cybercrimes commenced in January 2019, after he laundered $14.7 million stolen from a hacking campaign against a Maltese bank. These millions of funds were distributed to criminal-controlled accounts in Romania and Bulgaria.
In May 2019, the Nigerian fraudster laundered millions of pounds using a Mexico-based bank account, this time with the funds stolen from a large football club in the UK. Then, in October 2019, Hushpuppi performed fraudulent activities to rob hundreds of thousands of dollars from a New York-based law firm.
Aside from these charges, the Nigerian fraudster is also guilty of other cybercrimes, including targeting Qatar-based entrepreneurs with fake multi-million loans and tricking a victim into sending $330,000 for a purported loan approval fee.
Most of Hushpuppi’s fraudulent activities involved his co-conspirator, Ghaled Alaumary, who is currently serving an imprisonment sentence of 140 months after pleading guilty to money laundering schemes in November 2020.
