On Monday, January 23, 2012, Adekunle Olufemi Adetiloye, a citizen of Nigeria and resident of Canada, was sentenced by U.S. District Chief Judge Ralph R. Erickson to 17 years and 10 months in federal prison for one of the largest and most complex credit card schemes in North Dakota banking history.
In Bismarck, U.S. Attorney Timothy Q. Purdon said: “The sentence imposed today should send a strong message to those who would seek to scam the citizens and businesses of North Dakota and the United States. We take the growing problem of foreign financial fraud seriously here and seeking justice for the victims of such crimes is a priority for our office.”
According to African Interest Online, Adetiloye, 40, pleaded guilty on February 16, 2011, to participating in a scheme to defraud financial institutions and individuals out of money.
Adetiloye was living in Toronto, Canada, from before January of 2005 to May of 2010, when he was extradited to the United States.
During that time, Adetiloye funded a lavish lifestyle by conducting, with others, a massive fraud scheme accomplished by executing tens of thousands of fraudulent acts against individual people, financial institutions, commercial data providers, merchants, commercial mailbox companies, and state agencies.
Adetiloye’s scheme compromised the personal and private information of approximately 38,000 American citizens.
According to US Department of Justice, the scheme involved tens of thousands of acts of illegal conduct throughout the United States, as well as in Canada and England.
Adetiloye and his co-conspirators fraudulently obtained the personal identification information from commercial data providers, such as LexisNexis and ChoicePoint, and with that information assumed the identities of those unsuspecting people to open credit card and other bank accounts at U.S. Bank and twenty other banks across the United States.
Adetiloye used well over 100 different mail box addresses throughout the United States as well as approximately 100 different phone numbers with area codes representing all parts of the United States.
Many of the 38,000 people whose identities were compromised filed statements with the Court detailing the awful disruption and chaos they experienced as a result of this fraud.
U.S. Attorney Purdon added: “This defendant was not easy to find and his scheme was not easy to investigate. I want to recognise the outstanding efforts of Postal Inspector Matthew Hoffman. Without Inspector Hoffman’s hard work and dedication to seeing justice done for the victims in this case, today’s sentence would never have been imposed.
“I also want to recognize our Canadian and British law enforcement counterparts. This case was conducted primarily from Toronto and to a lesser extent London. We could not have done this case without incredible cooperation from the Ontario Provincial Police and the City of London Police.
“Finally, I want to recognise the outstanding efforts by Assistant U.S. Attorney Nick Chase and his team in our office. The dedicated men and women of the North Dakota U.S. Attorney’s Office continue to work hard and produce great results for the people of North Dakota and the United States.”
Along with the prison term, Adetiloye will be on supervised release for three years.
A hearing regarding restitution and forfeiture has been scheduled for February 15, 2012, in U.S. District Court in Fargo, at 9am.
Sources disclosed to Africaninterest.com that most Nigerians wanted by the US government for Identity theft and credit card fraud now find safe haven in Canada.
Africaninterest.com reliably gathered that One Taiye who escaped arrest in the arrest of over 40 Nigerians in 2008 in New York fled to Canada.
Another source disclosed that even some of these fraudsters live in Maryland, US.
The case was investigated by the U.S. Postal Inspection Service.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Nick Chase prosecuted the case.