Nigerian email scammer sent down for 40 months in the US, ordered to pay back $2.7m to victims A Nigerian email scammer based in New York was on Tuesday sentenced to 40 months in prison, and ordered to pay back $2.7m in stolen money. Ifeanyi Eke, who also went by the name Luther Mulbah Doley, had pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, and will serve three years of supervised release following …
A Nigerian email scammer based in New York ... He is also likely to be deported since he came to America from Nigeria in 2016 on a temporary work visa
Russian-based hackers have one golden rule: Never eat and $hit at the same place.
Apparently Eke was upset about the $188,000 stolen from the UN, so much so that he didn’t cash the check for a whole three days
He attempted to develop a "conscience" and failed (after three days) -- First step of being a politician.
It was his lawyer who asked for those 3 years of supervised release, there's nothing else in the story saying he got anything more than 40 months of jail time. Even deportation is just an assumption by Kieran (although a most probable one), at least from the actual facts transcribed in the piece.
Wow! I'm moving to America. The financial transaction side of banking must be stuck in the 70's.
Your not telling me that Cashiers Cheques (Checks) can be cashed in for thousand of dollars on presentation of a fake passport and ID? I once had trouble cashing a HMRC cheque for £240. No ID, no cash.
The worst bit in all this is that a fairly respectable small company called the "United Nations" fell for the scam also. Some more soul searching for them I guess.
But still eay money if you have no scruples, talking of which..... David (Dodgy) Cameron pops to mind.
Toodle Pip!
Re: "Your not telling me that Cashiers Cheques (Checks) can be cashed in for thousand of dollars on presentation of a fake passport and ID?"
Yup, that's exactly how it is. Money gets credited to your account immediately. This is essentially a measure of consumer protection, so that poor souls that are waiting for a paycheck get access to their funds immediately and don't have to wait for the banking system to clear the check. That will happen behind the scenes, and then the sender can claw their money back after up to 6 weeks.
A lot of advance fee fraud schemes depend on this delay. Scammers send you a check for $$$, you can cash it and see $$$ in your account immediately. Then you wire $$ back to the scammers using Western Union, -- where the money is gone for good right away -- and a few weeks later the bank takes all of the $$$ back because the check was bad.
To cash a check, you need to open a bank account first, and the bank will check your identity. There's a good amount of traceability, and you will likely be found if you cash a fraudulent check. That's why other Nigerian princes use money mules as go-betweens.
(Bank IT here) There is more to it. We have systems in place that prevent nearly all Check cashing/Deposit fraud. Internal monthly news letters note how much fraud was prevented among other things. If you are going to do banking fraud - don't trust the person "using you", learn about the real risk. Because if it's our bank, you are very likely to get caught. The smaller the bank the more suspicious they will be, the bigger the bank the better systems they will have. Best to keep your day job, less you like small living quarters with no privacy.
I'm only half joking when I argue that most of Africa is considerably more advanced when it comes to banking than the US – perhaps that's why he moved to the US in the first place, its much harder to scam Nigeria's fully mobile banking system ;-).
My father in law lives in the US and the fastest and cheapest way to move money between his own two accounts at two different banks is to go to the teller of one bank, take out cash from his own account at Bank A, drive (this is the US after all) the 30 metres to the other bank branch across the road and deposit it there into his own account at Bank B. That's the fastest and cheapest. It's insane.
A friend of mine runs a software company in Europe that regularly sells to some fairly big American organisations (municipal or state government for instance) and they pay his company with, I kid you not, paper checks. You just receive a check for 1.2 million USD in the post. In an envelope. Made from dead trees.
When I had some dealings with US suppliers three years ago I had to navigate the American byzantine red tape mountain and connect my all-in-one printer/scanner/fax to a phone line as vital parts of some processes could only be done via fax. Only during American business hours as the person on the other side had to be right next to the fax machine to receive it. In the 21st century.
I believe this is also why it's so often Americans who go on about the benefit of cryptocurrency for person-to-person transactions as in the US paying only one dollar and only waiting 20 minutes for a transaction is the stuff of science fiction. Here in Europe I can transfer money, for free, between accounts (even in different countries) and it takes seconds. It takes longer to close one banking app and open the other than it takes for the money to be transferred between the two banks. For me cryptocurrencies are not competitive for this use case, for Americans they are.
Our Canadian banking systems sound like they're very similar to the European ones. I can transfer money all over the place instantly with only occasionally a small service charge.
A few years ago we sold some used equipment to a US company. Actually getting the money took quite a while after it had been sent. Yes, faxing was involved between the US bank and our bank.
US cell service seems to be behind the times as well with their use of CDMA tech instead of GSM.
The closer you look, the more the USA exposes itself as a third-world country masquerading as a first-world one. Infrastructure falling apart or failing, police brutality, mobs attacking the capitol, out-of-date technology - perhaps in this respect it would have fitting had the republicans succeeded in attaining the autocratic banana republic they nearly achieved. As was noted, many of the world's smaller, poorer countries have left the US in their dust in these respects - often with the help of our Chinese brothers - who are not without some self-interest.
I think by that time he'll have had time to reflect his chosen profession should be a Nigerian Prince aka US Soldier, based locally, i.e. away from the US justice. Unless the US start delivering US court orders on predator pylons ;)
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