A Nigerian in the United States on a student visa was
sentenced to three years and 10 months in prison on Wednesday in a
sophisticated fraud scheme that cost banks and other businesses millions
of dollars.
Amechi Colvis
Amuegbunam, 30, pleaded guilty in March to one count of conspiracy to
commit wire fraud. He has been in custody since his arrest in Baltimore
in August 2015. .
The scheme
Amuegbunam was part of, had at least 10 victims and resulted in losses
of about $3.7 million, according to a news release from the U.S.
attorney’s office in Dallas. .
Amuegbunam
has also been ordered to pay $615,555 in restitution. From November
2013 through August 2015, Amuegbunam and others, sent fraudulent emails
to companies in North Texas and elsewhere including Luminant, Wells
Fargo and J.P. Morgan Chase. .
The
emails were designed to look like a forwarded message, supposedly from a
top executive at the company, sent to an employee in the firm’s
accounting department who had authority to make financial transfers, the
news release said. .
The
investigation began when two businesses reported to the Dallas FBI
office that they had received targeted spear phishing emails. Although
the emails appeared to be coming from a company executive, the messages
were actually coming from a fake email account. .
The
fraudulent domain name would contain one small difference from the
company’s true email address, such as transposed letters. The
investigation traced the creation of some of the documents to
Amuegbunam. .
The FBI has been
tracking what they now call business email compromise, or BEC schemes,
since 2013. According to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center
(IC3), between January 2015 and December 2016, there was a 2,370%
increase in identified exposed losses. .
Such scams have been reported in all 50 states and in 131 countries with losses totaling more than $5 billion.
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