Hefty sentences handed down to Nigerian scammers by US court in 2017, not 2024

“BREAKING: A court in Mississippi, USA has sentenced three Nigeria men to 235 years in prison for running online scams that duped people out of tens of millions of dollars,” reads a post shared on X on July 14, 2024.

The men are named as Oladimeji Seun Ayelotan, 30, Rasaq Aderoju Raheem, 31, and Femi Alexander Mewase, 45.  

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A screenshot of the misleading X post, taken on July 16, 2024

“A jury found all three guilty of mail fraud, wire fraud, identity theft, credit card fraud and theft of government property,” the post adds.

Reshared more than 2,000 times, the post includes police photographs of the alleged trio. 

The claim is described as breaking news, and several comments suggested that readers understood the news to be recent. 

The post was published by an account named “Olóyè T.D Esq”, who is described as a  human rights lawyer. His feed features news and current affairs and he has more than 149,000 followers. 

Other accounts on X ( here and here) and a local blog (here) also shared the same claim.

However, the posts are misleading.

Old news

To verify the claim, AFP Fact Check conducted a keyword search of one of the names of the accused. The result led to a press release from the US Department of Justice dated May 25, 2017 (archived here).

In the statement, the justice department said three Nigerian nationals — 30-year-old Oladimeji Seun Ayelotan, 31-year-old Rasaq Aderoju Raheem and 45-year-old Femi Alexander Mewase — were sentenced to 95, 115 and 25 years in jail, respectively.

These details in the posts were correct although today the men would be older. 

The press release explained how the men had been extradited from South Africa to the Southern District of Mississippi in July 2015 and sentenced in early 2017 for their roles in a large-scale international fraud network.

“After a three-week trial in early 2017, a federal jury found each defendant guilty of offenses involving mail fraud, wire fraud, identity theft, credit card fraud and theft of government property. Ayelotan and Raheem were also found guilty of conspiracies to commit bank fraud and money laundering,” the statement reads. 

“A total of 21 defendants were charged in this case, 12 of whom have pleaded guilty to charges related to the conspiracy, and 11 of whom have been sentenced to date. One of the leaders of the conspiracy, Teslim Olarewaju Kiriji, 30, of Nigeria was previously sentenced to 20 years in prison,” the statement added. 

Further internet searches revealed that the sentencing was covered by Nigerian news websites in May 2017 using the same mugshots, sourced from the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) here and here (archived here and here).

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Screenshot of the Punch newspaper story, taken July 18, 2024

Internet fraud in Nigeria

Called “Yahoo Yahoo” in Nigeria — a term derived from the popular email service Yahoo — internet scams encompass a wide range of fraudulent activities, including phishing, identity theft, and more complex romance and business email compromise (BEC) cons. 

In romance scams, perpetrators create fake online profiles to establish relationships with their victims, eventually soliciting money under false pretences. BEC scams, on the other hand, involve hackers gaining access to business email accounts to redirect payments to their own accounts.

According to the FBI, in 2020 alone, losses from BEC scams in the US amounted to $1.8 billion (archived here).

More than 2,800 people in Nigeria were convicted of cybercrime in 2022, according to the Economic and Financial Crime Commission (archived here). The agency is yet to publish the figures for 2023.

Several high-profile cyber-fraud cases have also been linked to Nigerians outside the country. For instance, Nigerian Instagram influencer Ramon Olorun Abbas was handed an 11-year jail term in the United States in 2022 after being found guilty of conspiring “to launder tens of millions of dollars through a series of online scams” (archived here).

Abidemi Rufai, a politician and aide to the Ogun state governor in southwest Nigeria, was also convicted in the US for a similar crime in 2022 (archived here). He was sacked after his crime came to light.