Chukwunonso Obiora, 37, was sentenced by United States District Judge Indira Talwani to 11 years in prison, to be followed by three years of supervised release. Obiora was also ordered to pay USD3,326,014.14 in restitution and forfeiture.

In June 2024, Obiora pleaded guilty to one count of passport fraud conspiracy and one count of money laundering conspiracy. Obiora was arrested on a criminal complaint in October 2023 in Atlanta, Ga. and was ordered held pending trial. He was indicted in January 2024.

Between at least as early as March 2021 and May 2023, Obiora and several conspirators agreed to receive and withdraw the proceeds of business email compromise frauds (BECs) from bank accounts that they controlled and to direct those funds to other conspirators, in exchange for a cut of the criminal proceeds.

BECs are a type of fraud scheme that targets companies that make regular business payments by bank transfer.

Criminals use email to impersonate trusted parties to the payments in order to trick the victim companies into sending money to bank accounts controlled by participants in the scheme.

The defendant’s money laundering conspiracy, of which he admitted to being a leader and organiser, involved obtaining individual victims’ means of identification and to create fake driver’s licences, incorporate businesses and open bank accounts in the victims’ names; providing the bank accounts to conspirators involved in the BEC schemes as accounts to which victims could be tricked into sending wires; withdrawing money quickly from the bank accounts once the wire transfers arrived, before victim companies learned that they had been tricked into sending money; and depositing the proceeds into other accounts and wiring BEC scheme proceeds to the defendant and others in Nigeria, China and elsewhere.

The defendant and his conspirators took steps to conceal the existence of the conspiracy, including by forging business invoices and writing false memos on cheques to suggest that the BEC scheme proceeds deposited into Destination Accounts were legitimate business revenues; and by making false statements to banks regarding the nature of the BEC scheme proceeds that were deposited into Destination Accounts.

The defendant and his U.S.-based conspirators shared at least as much as 40 percent of the deposited BEC scheme proceeds as payment for their roles in the conspiracy. In just two-plus years, the defendant and his co-conspirators engaged in at least USD6.5 million in financial transactions involving the proceeds of BEC schemes.

After immigration authorities removed the defendant from the United States in December 2021, he agreed with a close relative who is an American citizen to obtain a U.S. passport in the relative’s name, which the defendant could use to re-enter the United States illegally. The relative reported his passport lost or stolen and, in May 2023, applied for a new passport at a U.S. Post Office in Watertown, Mass. The sworn application had the relative’s name on it, but a picture of the defendant. The relative sent the issued passport to the defendant, who, in October 2023, used the passport to travel from Nigeria to Detroit, Michigan., where the defendant presented himself as his relative at the U.S. border.