A Nigerian citizen residing in Houston, Texas, was sentenced to nearly eight years in federal prison for leading a transnational network that laundered over $3.1 million from romance scams, email business fraud, and pandemic unemployment insurance fraud.
Oluwasegun Baiyewu, 40 years old, received a sentence of 95 months in prison on Friday, issued by a federal court. The U.S. Department of Justice reported that the defendant led the conspiracy alongside at least six accomplices distributed between the United States and Nigeria, according to the official statement from the Department of Justice.
The laundering mechanism was as simple as it was difficult to trace: illicit funds were used to purchase used and salvaged cars in the United States, which were then exported to Nigeria.
Communications among the network members were conducted via encrypted messaging applications such as WhatsApp.
"They conspired to launder funds from various organized international scams, including romance scams, pandemic unemployment insurance fraud, and email identity theft scams. These scams disproportionately affected older individuals or those in vulnerable situations in the United States," stated the text from the Department of Justice.
The operation ran from May 2020 to October 2021, a period during which unemployment insurance fraud surged in the United States due to the massive federal aid programs approved during the COVID-19 pandemic.
One of the most documented episodes of the case involves a Puerto Rican renewable energy company that was tricked into transferring approximately 280,000 dollars to bank accounts controlled by the fraudsters.
Baiyewu used part of that money to acquire vehicles on U.S. soil, which he then sent to Nigeria for the benefit of his accomplices.
After a 22-day trial held in San Juan, Puerto Rico, a federal jury found Baiyewu guilty in August 2025 on a charge of conspiracy to commit money laundering.
He was the fifth convicted defendant in this case; the others are Oluwaseun Adelekan, Temitope Omotayo, Ifeoluwa Dudubo, and Temitope Suleiman.
The victims of the scheme were located in California, Illinois, Washington, Nevada, Puerto Rico, and Missouri.
The case was investigated by the United States Postal Inspection Service, the Office of Inspector General of the Department of Labor, and the Cyber Task Force of the FBI in San Juan.
The crackdown on this type of networks falls under the Cyber-Enabled Fraud Initiative (CSI) of the Criminal Division of the Department of Justice, which brings together specialized prosecutors to expedite the prosecution of cyber financial crimes. The initiative is part of the Scam Center Strike Force, launched in November 2025.
The pattern of using physical exports of goods from the United States as a mechanism to move illicit funds abroad is not unique to this case.
This past Saturday, it was reported that a Russian citizen residing in South Florida was found guilty of illegally exporting nearly one million dollars in aviation parts to Russia, in violation of federal sanctions.
The magnitude of the problem is reflected in the figures from the annual report of the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center: in 2025, romance scams caused losses of 929.3 million dollars among American citizens, while business email fraud reached 3.05 billion dollars, within a record total of 20.877 billion dollars in reported cybercrime losses that year.
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