Many of us have a great aunt or a grandfather who has fallen for the classic Nigerian prince
e-mail scam.
Most of us shake our heads in disbelief when we hear of people who forked over hundreds
of dollars to an unknown sender with questionable grammar pretending to be royalty.
But perhaps we shouldn’t be so quick to judge their decision-making skills.
Because between 1995 and 1998, an entire Brazilian bank fell victim to such a scam and paid out
$242 million in cash to invest in a Nigerian airport..(pause)...that didn’t exist!
How could this have happened?
And how did the scammer eventually end up getting arrested for murder?
We mobilized our Internet scam task force to find out.
The country of Nigeria has unfortunately been associated with many instances of Internet
fraud, now commonly known as 419 fraud.
However, one man, Emmanuel Nwude, committed the biggest such Internet scam starting in
1995, before it was cool.
At that point, the Internet was still in its infancy, and people were somewhat more naive
about online scam artists.
To give you an idea of how long ago 1995 was in Internet years, Netscape Navigator was
the web browser of choice.
We’ll remind you that Netscape Navigator, just like AltaVista and GeoCities, is now
extinct.
So back to the biggest Internet con of all time - who was the man behind it?
Emmanuel Nwude had surprisingly respectable roots.
In the early 1990s, Nwude was living out a stable, prosperous life as Director of the
Union Bank of Nigeria, with several controlling stakes in other banks and institutions.
For most people, such a prestigious and relatively well-paid position would have probably sufficed
as far as life goals are concerned.
However, Nwude was not your average person.
One day, Nwude decided that instead of overseeing accounts and loans and whatever else a bank
director does, he would instead sell an airport to an international bank.
A grand, fully functional airport to be built in Abuja, the Nigerian capital.
The only problem: no such airport existed, and no such airport was being planned.
This didn’t stop Nwude, who decided that he had to impersonate someone even more prestigious
than himself in order for his scam to work.
So he used his insider banking knowledge and access to classified documents to pass himself
off as Paul Ogwuma, the Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria.
The Central Bank is the top financial authority in the entire country, and someone passing
himself off as the bank’s governor would undoubtedly engender trust in a foreign investor.
So Nwude, posing as Ogwuma, approached a Brazilian named Nelson Sakaguchi to propose this airport
transaction.
Sakaguchi wasn’t just anyone; he was a Director at Banco Noroeste, one of the biggest banking
institutions in Brazil, based in the mega city of Sao Paulo.
Nwude told Sakaguchi that the airport would cost around $242 million to build, so he would
need the banker to fork over $191 million in cash and $51 million in outstanding interest.
Though it might seem that Nwude was asking for a lot, the expected profits would have
quickly eclipsed any hesitations about cost.
In fact, given what most airports cost and eventually make, Sakaguchi thought he was
getting a pretty good deal.
In 1995, Abuja had a population of 525,000 that was rapidly growing at a rate of about
10% per year.
The city was attracting lots of people as it had replaced Lagos as Nigeria’s capital
just four years before.
Building an airport in Nigeria’s new capital city, in an increasingly interconnected country,
with a rapidly swelling population, seemed like good sense.
To give one example, Denver International Airport, which services a city of 619,000,
just over Abuja’s population back then, made $976.4 million in 2016 - the last year
for which data is available.
During the same year, Denver airport cost around $777 million to operate, meaning it
recorded a profit of just under $200 million dollars for one year.
This also explains why your 3-day-old ham and cheese sandwich at your last layover cost
$20 to reluctantly eat.
Taking these potential figures and profitability into account, it’s easy to see why Sakaguchi
was intrigued by the idea of investing in an airport.
It probably also helped that Nwude told Sakaguchi if he invested before the airport was fully
built, he would personally get a $10 million commission in addition to dividends from the
airport’s profits.
It further helped that since Sakaguchi was a banker, the $242 million he would be investing
wasn’t really his own money, but rather that of his clients and investors.
As multiple economic crises have shown us, bankers invest in terrible concepts quite
easily when it’s not their own money they have to worry about.
To clinch the business deal and get his commission, Sakaguchi handed over the $191 million in
cash.
It’s unclear if he never got around to researching anything related to the deal, such as if Abuja
had any plans whatsoever to build an airport, or he had some suspicions but overlooked them
in favor of a $10 million commission.
Sakaguchi continued to pay out the interest until 1998, as this incredibly long and slow
three year bank heist continued.
In fact, the first sense that something was wrong came only towards the very end of the
con.
Spain’s powerful Santander Bank had plans to buy out Noroeste.
During a joint board meeting in December of 1997, Santander executives saw that half of
Noroeste’s capital was in the Cayman Islands, completely unmonitored.
As the Cayman Islands are basically a punchline for shady business dealings, this raised some
alarms.
Santander initiated an investigation into the accounts and where the money was going,
an investigation that reached out from Brazil to Britain, Switzerland, the US, and Nigeria.
Eventually, when both Santander executives and Sakaguchi discovered the truth, that the
Abuja Airport was merely a dream, it was too late; Noroeste had been scammed.
In 2001, even after being bought out by Santander, Banco Noroeste completely collapsed.
Nwude, along with accomplices Emmanuel Ofolue, Nzeribe Okoli, Obum Osakwe, Christian Ikechukwu
Anajemba and his wife Amaka Anajemba, had already disappeared.
However, in 2002, Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo along with the Nigerian Parliament
created an Economic and Financial Crimes Commission to try to clamp down on corruption and financial
scams in Nigeria.
In February of 2004, Nwude and his associates, with the exception of Christian Anajemba,
who had been assassinated, were all arrested and charged in the Abuja High Court.
The charges were as follows: 86 counts of “fraudulently seeking advance fees” and
15 counts of bribery.
The defendants all pleaded not guilty.
Perhaps understandably, due to their history, High Court Judge Lawal Gumi warned them not
to bribe any of the court staff, as the repercussions would be even more severe.
Eventually, Gumi threw the case out and transferred it to the Lagos High Court.
There are different reports as to why Gumi did this.
Some people allege that Gumi got wind of Nwude bribing local officials and court staff anyway,
and thought the case would have a better chance of a fair trial in Lagos.
Other reports indicate that Gumi moved the case to the capital’s high court as the
crime was not committed in Abuja, and technically not in his jurisdiction.
In Lagos, Nwude, the man who apparently never learns his lesson, attempted to bribe the
head of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, Nuhu Ribadu.
Thankfully, Ribadu refused, and all this did is earn Nwude an additional charge of bribery
in his final trial.
It appears Nwude and his accomplices were still throwing all the Hail Mary passes they
could think of, as during the trial a bomb scare required the courthouse to be evacuated
for some time.
It’s not clear if this was an escape attempt of some sort, but nothing came of it.
Eventually, after Sakaguchi took the stand and embarrassingly testified that he had bought
a non-existent airport from the accused men, Nwude and his co-conspirator Okoli pleaded
guilty, hoping to get a lighter sentence.
The Ikeja High Court judge in Lagos found Nwude and his associates guilty of 86 counts
of fraudulently seeking advance fees, and the accompanying charges of bribery.
Even though Nwede was sentenced on five counts of five years in prison each, meaning 25 years
in total, the sentences were served concurrently.
In other words, Nwude was only really sentenced to 5 years in prison in addition to paying
a $10 million fine, and having his stolen assets returned to his victim.
Nwude served just two of those years before being released in 2006.
Then, because crime apparently does pay if you’re lucky and brazen enough, Nwude sued
for the return of some of his assets after his release.
He maintained that he had acquired some of the money taken from him before his offenses
were committed.
The courts ended up returning the completely reasonable sum of $167 million to Nwude.
By this time you might be thinking - but wait, didn’t you guys mention something about
a murder?
What happened there?
Well, on August 19, 2016, over 200 people attacked the town of Ukpo.
The reason for the attack was an ongoing land dispute with the neighboring community of
Agabana.
Multiple people were killed in the attack, including four policemen and security guard
Emmanuel Okafor.
The plot for the attack was hatched in the Owelle Inn in Agabana, which was owned by
Nwude, now a chief in the local Agabana community.
Anambra State Police Command accused Emmanuel Nwude of inciting and leading the attack.
He was arrested yet again, but this time on more serious charges.
Nwude was taken into custody on 27 charges of murder and attempted murder.
Here is where events become truly confusing.
Some reports came out in Nigerian newspapers alleging that another powerful, rich Nigerian
man had in fact paid off Anambra officials to pursue and arrest Nwude.
Reports up until 2017 place Nwude in Awka prison, awaiting trial.
Apparently, further charges were then brought against him as he was found to have conspired
with two others to tamper with one of the properties the court initially ordered him
to forfeit to his victims in 2004.
Thanks to these findings, on March 2, 2018, Nwude was arraigned on 15 charges of forgery
and dealing in forfeited property.
Nwude and his defense lawyer made a plea to be granted bail, as Nwude alleged he was preparing
for a serious prostate cancer surgery later in the month.
The presiding judge, Justice Dada, noted that though this was a serious claim, the fact
that Nwude was a lifelong conman who had provided not a single scrap of proof that any cancer
surgery was scheduled to take place, created some doubts for her.
She then promptly denied him bail.
However, there seem to be no reports of further developments in the forgery or the murder
case.
In fact, the only recent news stories to have emerged about Emmanuel Nwude indicate he is
still in the Awka area, but is now Chief Emmanuel Nwude, as he has become president-general
of the Ugbene town union.
There is no mention of further charges, trials, or jail time after 2018.
As for why, no one but Nwude probably knows.
For those wondering, an airport was finally built in Abuja in 2000, and opened in 2002.
Currently, the Nnamdi Azikiwe International Airport serves almost 5 million passengers
a year.
Unsurprisingly, Emmanuel Nwude has no involvement with this airport.
Emmanuel Nwude’s $242 million scam is currently considered the third biggest bank fraud in
history.
The details of how he managed to convince a respected bank director to invest in a non-existent
airport may be sealed in court documents, but the sheer scale and ambition of this con
have made him infamous.
The complete lack of information as to how Nwude seems to have dodged his most recent
charges of murder and forgery and has calmly returned to his life as a town chief has created
an even bigger mystery, for which no one seems to have any good answers.
What do you think happened?
Let us know!
And now that you’ve reached the end and sworn to yell at your relatives to never click
on scam e-mails again, why not keep watching some cool videos!
Click this video here, or maybe this other one instead!