Tampa, Florida – United States Legal professional Roger B. Handberg publicizes the unsealing of 4 indictments charging Akinola Taylor (Nigeria), Olayemi Adafin (United Kingdom), Olakunle Oyebanjo (Nigeria), and Kazeem Olanrewaju Runsewe (Nigeria), with conspiracy to commit wire fraud, submitting false claims with the US, theft of public cash or property, and aggravated identification theft. Taylor, Adafin, and Runsewe, have been every arrested on November 30, 2022, and Oyebanjo was arrested on December 1, 2022. Taylor, Adafin, and Oyebanjo have been apprehended in London, United Kingdom, and Runswewe was apprehended in Malmo, Sweden. Every will face extradition proceedings. Together with the arrests, international authorities performed searches of the residences of Taylor and Runsewe.
If convicted, every faces a most penalty of 20 years in federal jail for the wire fraud depend, in addition to further penalties for the remaining counts. The indictments additionally notify the defendants that the US intends to forfeit property that are alleged to be traceable to proceeds of the offense.
In line with the indictments, Taylor and Runsewe obtained unauthorized entry to United States companies’ laptop servers, participated in stealing from these servers the personally figuring out info of United States residents and used that info to file false and fraudulent Inner Income Service (IRS) Kind 1040, United States Particular person Earnings Tax Returns (“Kind(s) 1040”) looking for earnings tax refunds with the IRS. Adafin and Oyebanjo assisted within the assortment fraud proceeds directed to pay as you go debit playing cards of their possession or to addresses or financial institution accounts they managed or to which that they had entry and transferred a share of the fraud proceeds to different conspirators.
One of many locations that Taylor and Runsewe had obtained unauthorized entry to laptop servers was the xDedic Market, a web site that operated for years and was used to promote entry to compromised computer systems worldwide and personally identifiable info of U.S. residents. The xDedic directors strategically maintained servers all around the world to facilitate the operation of the web site.
The xDedic Market was taken down as a part of coordinated, world enforcement operations led by the FBI (Tampa Division) the IRS-CI (Tampa Area Workplace) and the U.S. Legal professional’s Workplace for the Center District of Florida.
The investigation was led by the IRS-CI Cyber Crimes Unit (Washington, D.C). Substantial help was supplied by the IRS-CI Tampa Area Workplace, the FBI Tampa Division, the Division of Justice’s Workplace of Worldwide Affairs, IRS-CI Worldwide Operations at Mission UK and Canada, Homeland Safety Investigations (HSI), the UK’s Nationwide Extradition Unit, the UK’s Japanese Area Particular Operation Unit, the UK’s North West Regional Organized Crime Unit, and the Swedish Financial Crime Authority.
The instances can be prosecuted by Assistant United States Legal professional Rachel Jones.
An indictment is merely a proper cost {that a} defendant has dedicated a number of violations of federal legal legislation, and each defendant is presumed harmless except, and till, confirmed responsible.