Instagram star gets 11 years for $300m email scam plot An international cyber-scammer and Instagram star who plotted to launder more than $300 million over the course of 18 months was this week jailed – and he must pay back more than $1.7 million to his victims. Nigerian-born Ramon Olorunwa Abbas, 40, also known as Ray Hushpuppi, pleaded guilty to conspiracy and will spend 11 …
Plenty of uncaught cybercriminals that are just barely smart enough to stay off Instagram. Wonder if there is a line item for what Metaface raked in for ads to his "followers", and what his end of the take was. Zuckerburg DNGAF if you are comitting obvious fraud, so long as you keep their ad revenue up. But they will be spared the public embarrassment, as Meta was collecting it's cut from Rolex and Bentley, who are hardly going to out themselves for serving ads targeting the shady Dubai jet set.
Once again, hats off to the Lads from Lagos, those magnificent bastards. The vintage 419s may nearly lost to history, but the game is still going strong.
A few days ago I got a phone call form my pension company asking if I had requested an options form for taking my pension. I had not, and they explained that they'd had a phone call form someone purporting to be me, requesting a form, which had been sent, and they had received it completed (with the take all my fund as cash' box ticked). Listening to the call recording, they realised it did not sound like me, but more like the fraudster who had attempted the same trick over two ears ago.
So now I've had to warn all the other companies that the fraudsters are back, and are stealing my post again. Really quite stressful, but not lost any money this time (yet).
Be alert and check, and set up passwords for withdrawals on accounts if you can. These people have a high gain, low risk way of stealing your money - no one is actually trying to catch them because they count as 'small fry' and the really big fraudsters like Mr Hushpuppi are the ones the police go after.
Merry Christmas everybody.
> ...my pension company asking if I had requested an options form for taking my pension. ..snip.. with the 'take all my fund as cash' box ticked.
Sounds like it may be time for YOU to 'take all my fund as cash' and put the loot someplace safer. Under your bed, CryptCoin, Meta stock, anywhere but there.
You do have me thinking. I just elected to get my US Social Security (money for old folks) payments. I did it all on-line. I don't know what "shared secret" confirmed my identity. "Everybody" knows my SS#, my birthday, all the usual bumph. When I log-in on the SS site they send me a one-time PIN, but they send it to an email address "I" supplied a few years ago. They will send the money to a bank account "I" designated. Or was it my long-term evil maid? A long-game hacker?
And yeah. In that photo he looks like us the first winter in Maine, with the crappy old heater: heavy clothes and blanket in over-stuffed furniture. A millionaire should live better.
And also any future pension contributions, including your on your employer's scheme are going to be a big problem.
If you are concerned about your current pension provider, then consider moving the money to another provider.
Don't move it if your pension scheme is a government scheme or old company scheme that has guarantees.
"a phone call form someone purporting to be me, requesting a form, which had been sent, and they had received it completed"
Zero marks to the pension company. Why would they send a form of this sensitivity (indeed any correspondence) to an address other than the one registered by the legitimate customer? And if an attempt were made to change the address, they should always confirm to the original contact.
Nice try but 11 years is actually surprisingly light for someone who has aggressively scammed hundreds of millions, knew exactly what he was doing and then flaunted his ill gotten gains. Bringing up a non relevant and bizarre race argument is - dare I say it - kind of racist.
The reason they spend longer sentences isn't the color of thier skin it is the nature of the crimes, and you have the current President to thank for that!
The majority of blacks imprisoned post 1990 are for drug crimes which had federally imposed minimum sentences. This also includes murder where drugs are involved. These laws specifically targeted drugs predominantly used by blacks, i.e. crack and heroin. Powdered cocain was not included in these laws, why? That's a white people drug! It's the same with opioids but that's a whole nuther issue.
Everyone wants to believe it is the Right in America that is racist, but if you take a critical look at the laws passed by the Left since 1964 you see a pattern of deliberate attempts to degrade and destroy the lives of black Americans.
Do not listen to what they say, look at what they do!
The "tough on crime" movement in the Federal and state governments was equal-opportunity for legislators. Certainly many Democrats contributed – it was the Clintons who popularized the bullshit "superpredator" idea – but Republicans are by no means innocent.
Neither party has a consistently good record on race. Republicans initially were the abolitionist party, but many (including Lincoln) wanted to institute racial "purity" by deporting people of African ancestry back to Africa. And while Democrats were the main supporters of segregation and Jim Crow for decades, around the middle of the 20th century those roles began to shift with the Republican Party becoming more and more regressive while the Democratic Party officially supported civil rights. (If not particularly enthusiastically. Most of the civil-rights improvements in the US were a combination of popular support by the Silent Generation and decisions by SCOTUS prior to Nixon's appointment of Burger as CJ.)
And as I noted above, neither Clinton nor Obama were good on civil rights, broadly speaking; and Carter was hamstrung by rebellion in his own party, 70's malaise, a (largely failed) focus on environmental affairs, and foreign-policy distractions.
Which part of the argument is flawed? The part about 11 years being pretty light for defrauding SMEs, businesses and individuals out of millions and laundering money for very unsavory entities?
BTW looks like Holmes got a 1/4 year longer sentence than your poor maligned Instagram friend there, so..
Yes and no. On one hand sentencing done right is complex, depending on a number of factors (crime, priors, risk of re-offending etc): almost no two cases are perfectly equal. On the other hand USA most certainly has a serious institutionalised racism problem, including in the judicial system.
Elizabeth Holmes defrauded a bunch of tech-bro vulture capitalists (no one who actually understood clinical chemistry believed her for a New York second) , which some would argue is almost but not quite a public service[1]. This man laundered money for pretty much all comers, as well as actively defrauded several people, which is a different set of crimes.
[1] I don't agree personally, since her bullshit almost certainly confused a bunch of innocent bystanders, and ate money that could have been used to do actual good.
Apparently she *didn't* defraud the little people, you know people getting misleading results from her tests or anything.
"Holmes, 37, reportedly showed little emotion when the verdicts were read out. The jury found her not guilty of four charges of defrauding the public, though this was cold comfort when set against the other seven charges of defrauding investors and wire fraud. She has denied the charges."
https://www.theregister.com/2022/01/04/elizabeth_holmes_guilty_verdict_theranos/
This is becoming quite a common story, and is perhaps one of the few benefits of the "look at me" culture of showing off on things like Instagram : the police can see them, and then turn up and ask them where they got all the cash from.
Of course there are some who are smart enough to not behave this stupidly, but the temptation to flaunt all the new bling and build up a social media following seems to be part of the same mindset that leads people to believe they can be a successful scammer.
Yup, and we all know the cops will harvest the low hanging fruit first, just like anyone else would. They'll bust the ones who go online and not only confess but brag about the crime first. Easy and effective.
"one of the few benefits of the "look at me" culture of showing off on things like Instagram : the police can see them"
I remember a couple of burglars who posted on farcebook from the victim's premises or laptop. Not surprisingly, they got caught.
I recall there was also a chap hiding in his cupboard while the police searched his home, posted in real time where he was and mocking the police for not finding him. Strangely he got caught too. <Thinks> Hey! Maybe the police use social media too?
A number of cases along those lines have been described in legal blogs such as Underhill's Lowering the Bar.
It's a variation on the "trail of evidence leading to the suspect's door" theme. And that really happens, too; Underhill mentioned a guy who stole a lot of quarters from an automated carwash and left a trail of them as he tried to lug them all home.
In the days of Greta Thunberg and COP27 and the climate crisis, shouldn't he get extra time for the use of a private jet? Or would that set a bad precedent for all those celebrities who really need to fly separately from us plebs?
(Troll icon, cos climate change is such a divisive issue these days.)
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