A thirty-year-old Nigerian,
Amechi Colvis Amuegbunam, has been sentenced to 3 years and 10 months in prison
in a sophisticated fraud scheme that cost banks and other businesses millions
of dollars.
The overnight big boy was
sentenced to prison on Wednesday.
Amuegbunam pleaded guilty
in March to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud.
He has been in custody
since his arrest in Baltimore in August 2015.
According to the statement
released by U.S. attorney’s office in Dallas, the suspect duped at least 10
victims and resulted in losses of about $3.7 million.
Amuegbunam has also been
ordered to pay $615,555 in restitution. From November 2013 through August 2015,
Amuegbunam and others, sent fraudulent emails to companies in North Texas and
elsewhere including Luminant, Wells Fargo and J.P. Morgan Chase.
The emails were designed to
look like a forwarded message, supposedly from a top executive at the company,
sent to an employee in the firm’s accounting department who had authority to
make financial transfers, the news release said.
The investigation began
when two businesses reported to the Dallas FBI office that they had received
targeted spear phishing emails. Although the emails appeared to be coming from
a company executive, the messages were actually coming from a fake email
account.
The fraudulent domain name
contained one small difference from the company’s true email address, such as
transposed letters. Investigation eventually traced the creation of some of the
documents to Amuegbunam.
The FBI has been tracking
what they now call business email compromise, or BEC schemes, since 2013.
According to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3), between January
2015 and December 2016, there was a 2,370% increase in identified exposed losses.
Such scams have led to
losses totalling more than $5 billion.
shame
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