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64-yr-old Nigerian charged for masterminding email hacks, romance scams

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64-yr-old Nigerian charged for masterminding email hacks, romance scams

A 64 year-old man from Nigeria is set to be tried in the US for masterminding a string of business email hacks and romance scams.

Babatunde Martins is one of eleven people indicted in the Western Tennessee US District Court on charges of wire fraud, conspiracy, computer fraud, money laundering, and identity theft.

Prosecutors say that Martins was a key part of the group that in 2016 used spoofed email addresses and phished accounts to eavesdrop on the dealings of a Tennessee real estate company and, at various times, instruct unsuspecting employees to re-route outgoing payments into the accounts of money mules who then wired the stolen funds overseas.

Martins, it is alleged in the indictment, not only participated in the business email compromise scheme, but also owned and operated a Ghana-based business that was used to launder the pilfered money.

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It is alleged that the funds stolen from the real estate company were supplemented by cash from more conventional online rackets, including romance scams, gold buying schemes, credit card fraud, and other nefarious social engineering tricks that resulted in victims being coerced into sending money and goods to Martins and his co-conspirators.

According to prosecutors, “The indictment alleges that various Africa-based co-conspirators committed, or caused to be committed, a series of intrusions into the servers and email systems of a Memphis-based real estate company in June and July 2016.

“Using sophisticated anonymization techniques, including the use of spoofed email addresses and Virtual Private Networks, the co-conspirators identified large financial transactions, initiated fraudulent email correspondence with relevant business parties and then redirected closing funds through a network of US-based money mules to final destinations in Africa.”

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