3 Nigerian nationals have been extradited from the UK to the US following allegedly taking part in enterprise email compromise (BEC) attacks that attempted to steal millions from American organizations, which includes universities.
The alleged crimes deal with jurisdictions in North Carolina, Texas and Virginia. They relate to Oludayo Kolawole John Adeagbo (aka John Edwards and John Dayo), 43, a Nigerian citizen and UK resident Donald Ikenna Echeazu (aka Donald Smith and Donald Dodient), 40, a dual UK and Nigerian citizen and Olabanji Egbinola, 42.
In North Carolina, Adeagbo and Echeazu allegedly conspired with others on a traditional BEC scheme in which they spoofed the domain of a design enterprise and then despatched bogus invoices to a community college.
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They tricked the university into wiring $1.9m in money, which they then laundered “through a series of financial transactions,” according to the Section of Justice (DoJ).
In the Southern District of Texas, Adeagbo allegedly conspired with others to steal $3m from area corporations which includes design companies, regional government entities and a Houston-space faculty.
“The indictment alleges Adeagbo and his co-conspirators registered domain names that appeared related to genuine companies. They then sent email messages from people domains pretending to be workers at these businesses, in accordance to the expenses,” the DoJ explained.
“The conspirators allegedly despatched e-mail to shoppers or shoppers of the businesses they impersonated and deceived those shoppers into sending wire payments to bank accounts they controlled.”
Eventually, in the Eastern District of Virginia, Egbinola is reported to have labored with others to generate a bogus email account for a design corporation which had a massive contract with a neighborhood university.
They made use of this to trick the victim business into wiring practically $500,000, which was swiftly laundered abroad, the DoJ mentioned.
Numerous of the crimes day back to 2016. The 3 were being arrested in the UK in 2020 and their closing appeals from extradition had been turned down by the UK Higher Court on July 12 2022.
BEC is the most important money-maker of any cybercrime action, netting criminals virtually $2.4bn previous year. That is over a 3rd (35%) of complete cybercrime losses documented to the FBI in 2021.
Some pieces of this short article are sourced from:
www.infosecurity-journal.com