Ramon Abbas a.k.a Hushpuppi has been jailed for 11 years by US district court in California and he is also to pay $1,732, 841m (about N1.4B) to two victims of his internet fraud activities.
Lagos-born Hushpuppi pleaded guilty before the court.
According to Don Alway, the assistant director in charge of the FBI’s Los Angeles field office, Abbas had – behind the glitz of his account – become “one of the most prolific money launderers in the world”.
“Abbas leveraged his social media platforms… to gain notoriety and to brag about the immense wealth he acquired by conducting business email compromise scams, online bank heists and other cyber-enabled fraud that financially ruined scores of victims and provided assistance to the North Korean regime,” Mr. Alway said in a court document on Monday.
Abbas pleaded guilty to money laundering last year, admitting attempting to steal more than $1.1m from someone who wanted to fund a new children’s school in Qatar. Court documents in California say he played a key role in the scheme, playing “the roles of bank officials and creating a bogus website”.
He also admitted to “several other cyber and business email compromise schemes that cumulatively caused more than $24 million in losses”, the US justice department said.
Among them was a 2019 scheme, which plunged the European island of Malta into chaos as payment systems shut down after he tried to launder €13m ($13m) stolen by a gang of North Korean hackers from the Maltese Bank of Valletta.
At one point on Instagram, Abbas said he was a real estate developer and had a category of videos called “Flexing” – social media lingo for showing off.
In 2020, he renewed his lease for another year at the exclusive Palazzo Versace apartments in Dubai under his real name and phone number.
“Thank you, Lord, for the many blessings in my life. Continue to shame those waiting for me to be shamed,” he captioned an Instagram picture of a Rolls-Royce just a fortnight before he was arrested.
