This is Ramon Abbas popularly known as Hushpuppi.
He’s a Nigerian influencer known for posting photos and videos of his expensive lifestyle
on Instagram, where he has 2.5m followers and on Snapchat where he had over one
million subscribers.
$40m in cash, 13 luxury cars worth $6.8m,
21 computers,
47 smartphones and the addresses of nearly two million alleged victims.
This was what was recovered by the Dubai police when he was arrested in June, 2020.
He was then taken to the United States of America by the FBI where he remains.
Court records from the US where he pleaded guilty to money laundering in April this year
revealed his involvement in a clandestine criminal operation
that made the FBI tag him as one of the most high-profile money launderers in the world.
His targets allegedly included a US law firm, a foreign bank and an English premier league club.
Well Ramon Abbas is a high level member of a transnational criminal enterprise
out of West Africa that he and his group are responsible for millions and millions
of dollars worth of fraud which is known within the FBI it's the Business Email Compromise.
But one of the things that was different about him is he flaunted it all on his stuff.
He really kind of put it in everybody's face like
'Hey look at me, look what I've done and look at my helicopters I'm flying in.
Look at the lifestyle I have' and that's one of the things that really caused his demise.
HushPuppi was was born in Nigeria and raised in Oworonshoki, a low-income area in Lagos.
Sometime around 2014, he moved to Malaysia and by 2017 he moved to Dubai.
With a lifestyle funded by money obtained by fraudulent means, how big of a scammer was Abbas?
His former lawyer Gal Pissetsky describes him as a middle man.
When you look at the bottom line here as far as what Ramon is charged with or has
allegedly done and to what he pled guilty to, you know when you look at it specifically as to him.
Ramon was not that big money launderer that the newspapers or the government had made him to be
in my opinion. He was more of maybe what I would call a middleman in some instances
I would say that most of these alleged schemes did not come to fruition.
Court documents revealed his crimes cost victims almost $24m.
They include a scheme to steal more than $1.1million from a business person funding
a children’s school in Qatar, and laundering of illicit funds in banks all over the world.
In the early 2000s when Hushpuppi was a young man there was the explosion of internet cafes
across Nigeria. Young people flocked to these cafes as a source of entertainment.
Not too long after reports of cybercrime started to emerge as
young men in chat rooms extorted money from friends they made.
These scams evolved into romance scams, and advance fee scams, phishing and other crimes.
Cybercrime expert, Dr Adedeji Oyenuga has studied these men and their crimes.
Cybercrime is evolving every time because when a particular technique is popular,
the law enforcement will be trying to track down that particular technique and then
they discard it and look for another. They always come up with newer techniques. For example,
when they realized that they could be tracked on their laptops, they came up with the idea of VPN
and when they realised VPN could be bolstered. They came up with the idea
of buying logins from the dark web. One of the techniques Hushpuppi
used to successfully obtain money from his victims was via business email compromise.
This is what it is.
So Business Email Compromise is a type of scam that targets companies and organisations
for financial gain or data theft.
Cyber criminals, you know they will typically compromise or spoof a legitimate email account
and then send fraudulent emails to an addressee requesting transfer of funds or sensitive data,
and then will try and add some urgency to it as well.
So you know they will put some other information in there to make you think all right, this is urgent I've got to act now,
so it puts a bit of pressure on the person receiving that email.
Then also quite carefully craft some of these emails as well,
so they you know they will be using things they may have taken off social media about the person who sent the email
so they will seem quite legitimate.
An FBI crime report for 2020, revealed over $1bn was lost by victims of BEC.
According to a lot of reports and according to cyber security ventures,
this cybercrime problem globally has grown from a 3 trillion dollar problem to a
6 trillion dollar problem! And this is from 2015, Now just think about how big that is?
Because a lot of the fraud going on is impacting senior citizens, its impacting small businesses.
I've seen church and non profit organisations destroyed by these enterprises.
What we see specifically in Africa is a very steep
upward curve over the last sort of five to 10 years of connectivity.
Online crime has grown. It's very difficult for law enforcement to get a true perspective of the
levels, because the reporting of cyber crime is often very underreported or not reported as well.
What we are seeing in Africa, though, is we're seeing a greater take up
of the sort of the mobile phone Apps so a lot of people, not in Nigeria, but also across Africa
are using banking Apps to do their business and their money transfers
So what we are seeing is organized crime groups organized crime networks and individuals and they
may have some skills they may have some ability within being able to get into systems.
Nigeria is listed by the FBI as the 16th country worst affected by cybercrime.
In a recent research by Cyber security company Agari,
it found that 50% of all BEC attacks originate from Nigeria.
Meanwhile, Hushpuppi is looking at a prison sentence of up to 20 years.
He is due to appear in a Californian court in October.
Law enforcement agencies hope that such high profile arrests of Hushpuppi
and his accomplices will deter other cybercriminals.