United States Attorney Joe Kelly announced that Adewale Aniyeloye, age 32 from Nigeria, was sentenced today for Wire Fraud. United States District Court Judge Robert F. Rossiter, Jr., sentenced Aniyeloye to a 96-month term of imprisonment. After his release from prison, Aniyeloye will begin a 3-year term of supervised release. The restitution amount is to be determined and will be ordered at a later date.
From approximately February 2015 to September 2016, Aniyeloye and other co-conspirators engaged in a form of fraud commonly referred to as business e-mail compromise. Aniyeloye used compromised e-mail accounts to send spoofed e-mails to thousands of business employees across the United States who had accounting responsibilities, to include authorizing and sending wire transfers. A spoofed e-mail is one in which the e-mail appears to be originating from a sender other than the person who is truly the sender. Aniyeloye and his co-conspirators posed as Chief Executive Officers or other business executives and would direct recipients of the spoofed e-mails to complete wire transfers. The business employees, thinking that the wire transfer requests were legitimate, would comply with the wire transfer requests and wire money to the location designated in the written instructions. The scheme was primarily conducted from Nigeria where Aniyeloye was living. In 2016, investigators learned Aniyeloye was planning to travel to the United States. He was arrested upon his arrival in Atlanta. Pursuant to this scheme, businesses, including businesses in the District of Nebraska, lost more than $6 million. The attempted losses pursuant to the scheme are more than $30 million. The two Nebraska victims of the fraud scheme lost approximately $163,230.
This case was investigated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Source: U.S. Department of Justice, Office of the United States Attorneys
