31-year-old Solomon Ekunke Okpe of Lagos, Nigeria, was a member of a gang that orchestrated and carried out a wide array of scams over the course of five years, from December 2011 to January 2017. The scams included business email compromise (BEC), romance scams, working-from-home scams, and more. The gang operated by using fraudulent email addresses and other tactics to defraud their victims of hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Okpe and his co-conspirators would use the business email compromise, or BEC, scam to trick victims into transferring large sums of money, by impersonating an executive or trusted business partner. The gang would also use romance scams to target vulnerable individuals, by creating romantic relationships with their victims and then asking them for money. They even carried out working-from-home scams, in which they would ask victims to pay them in advance for training and materials needed for a job that never materialized.
The gang was finally brought down in January 2017, when the FBI and other law enforcement agencies arrested Okpe and his co-conspirators. In the end, the victims of their scams had collectively lost hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Okpe was sentenced to nine years in prison for his involvement in the frauds. He was also ordered to pay back the majority of the money that he had stolen from his victims. His co-conspirators were also sentenced to varying lengths of prison time depending on their level of involvement.
In summary, Solomon Ekunke Okpe, of Lagos, Nigeria, was a member of a gang that perpetrated numerous scams, including business email compromise, romance scams, and working-from-home scams over five years. The gang defrauded victims of hundreds of thousands of dollars, before law enforcement agencies arrested the members in 2017. Okpe was sentenced to nine years in prison, and was ordered to pay back the majority of the money stolen from his victims.
Key Points:
– Solomon Ekunke Okpe was a member of a gang that perpetrated various scams from December 2011 to January 2017
– The scams included business email compromise (BEC), romance scams, working-from-home scams
– The gang defrauded victims of hundreds of thousands of dollars
– Okpe was sentenced to nine years in prison, and ordered to repay the stolen money
– His co-conspirators were also sentenced to varying lengths of prison time depending on their level of involvement