Man gets 10 years for stealing $20M in nest eggs from 400 US home buyers

A Nigerian man living in the United Kingdom has been sentenced to 10 years for his role in a phishing scam that snatched more than $20 million from over 400 would-be home buyers in the US, including some savers who lost their entire nest eggs. Late last week, the US Department of Justice confirmed that 33-year-old Babatunde Francis Ayeni pled guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud through "a sophisticated business email compromise scheme targeting real estate transactions" in the US. To seize large down payments on homes, Ayeni and co-conspirators sent phishing emails to US title companies, real estate agents, and real estate attorneys. When unsuspecting employees clicked malicious attachments and links, a prompt appeared asking for login information that was then shared with the hackers. Once the hackers were in, they could monitor their emails "for transactions where a buyer was scheduled to make a payment as part of a real estate transaction," then swoop in to send wiring instructions to transfer funds to compromised accounts instead, the DOJ said. To help cover their tracks, co-conspirators then converted the money into Bitcoin on Coinbase. The scam was seemingly uncovered after co-conspirators targeted a real estate title company in Gulf Shores, Alabama. More than half of the victims were unable to reverse the wire transactions. According to The Record, two victims who shared impact statements in court lost more than $114,000, including a man who "tried to buy his elderly father a home following a Parkinson's diagnosis." As if home buying isn't stressful enough, victims "felt significant shame, despair, and depression" after being targeted at such an emotional time. US attorney Sean P. Costello noted that cyber-crimes "can cause substantial and lasting harm to victims in an instant." The DOJ's press release noted that Ayeni's co-defendants Feyisayo Ogunsanwo and Yusuf Lasisi "remain at-large and are believed to be outside the United States." Similar scams are becoming increasingly common in the US, the FBI warned, after losses from online fraud increased by 22 percent between 2022 and 2023—with fraudsters snatching more than $12.5 billion in total from Americans last year. Business email compromise scams like Ayeni's alone accounted for nearly $3 billion, the FBI said. A special agent in charge of the mobile division of the FBI, Paul Brown, encouraged other fraud victims to come forward, vowing that "this type of behavior will not be tolerated in Alabama." "After listening to our citizens speak about how the loss of funds impacted their lives and the subsequent loss of what they thought was down payments for their future homes, I am pleased to see Ayeni receive a substantial sentence for these crimes," Brown said.