Nigerian Man Bags 20 Years for U.S. Property Scam
A Nigerian man, for his part as one of the masterminds of a complicated cyber-enabled fraud scheme that defrauded an American homebuyer of a fortune in excess of R3.2 million, was on Tuesday, April 8, sentenced to 20 years imprisonment at the Johannesburg Specialised Commercial Crimes Court.
Abdul Olatunji Samson, a nightclub owner of great fame, has been sentenced to 20 years imprisonment for theft and money laundering. The man received two sentences concurrently for both offenses.
This originated from a complaint filed with the FBI, which in turn carried out the investigation in conjunction with the US Secret Service and the Hawks of South Africa.
As clarified by Phindi Mjonondwane, spokesperson for the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA), the email interception between the US victim and their conveyancer during a property purchase subject to the fraud was “The fraud exactly happened because of email linking between the complainant and his conveyancing attorney during the purchase of the property”.
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“Therefore Samson substituted the attorney’s legitimate banking particulars and attached these to a fraudulent Bank of America account,” Mjonondwane explained.
One such example resulted in the transferral of an amount over US$200,000 (around R3.2 million), which investigators proved R1.9 million of that amount directly benefitted Samson.
Samson had at the time been sentenced to an unrelated form of 12-year imprisonment for fraud. It is documented HERE.
The court thus found that the earlier conviction operated as an aggravating factor, showing a pattern of clear criminal behaviour.
At the time of his arrest, Samson was serving a 12-year sentence for fraud in an unrelated case. The court held that earlier conviction as an aggravating factor indicating clear pattern of criminal behavior.
Lead Investigator Colonel Oscar Mopedi was key in cracking the international money route that revealed that the money was stolen and channeled through different South African bank accounts before it was actually accessed by the accused.
In passing sentence, senior state advocate Ronel Dookun told the court that cyber fraud of this nature is particularly hard to detect and prove as it often involves extensive cross-border cooperation and is very technically sophisticated.
Sentences must reflect the serious impact these crimes have, especially when committed purely for self-enrichment,” Dookun said.
Mjonondwane mentioned that complex fraud-and-corruption cases take as long as eight years to finalize internationally and that the adversarial legal system in South Africa rarely has guilty pleas towards such kinds of crimes, which adds further delay to the litigation process.
The NPA welcomed the sentence given to the accused, emphasizing that such sentences must be put in place to send a strong message regarding the legal consequences of cybercrime and transnational fraud in an increasingly digitizing global economy.
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