British-Nigerian hacker pleads guilty to $6m fraud in US court

A British-Nigerian man has confessed in a US court to defrauding and stealing more than $6m (£4.7m) over seven years.

Idris Dayo Mustapha, 33, was part of a hacking ring that infiltrated email and brokerage accounts of US firms between 2011 and 2018, causing losses worth $6m (£4.7m), officials said.

A dual national of the UK and Nigeria, Mustapha was extradited from the UK in August, two years after his arrest.

His crimes carry a jail term of up to 20 years.

He has not yet been sentenced.

Mustapha pleaded guilty plea at a court in Brooklyn, New York, on Tuesday to four charges: computer intrusion, securities fraud, wire fraud and access device fraud.

Authorities say Mustapha and his ring hacked into the computer servers of financial institutions in the US to access confidential user data, such as users' personal identifying information.

They then used the stolen information and passwords to wire funds and transfer securities from the accounts of their victims to accounts under their control.

They also used the hacked accounts to conduct stock trades without the knowledge of the account holder.

US authorities had been pursuing Mustapha for several years.

By Gloria Aradi, Reuters

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Nigerian saved from football scam

 A Nigerian footballer has arrived back home from Mongolia following an ordeal that saw him scammed by a shady agent who promised him a glittering sports career that never materialised.

Moshood Afolabi, 24, arrived at the Murtala Muhammed International Airport, Lagos on Saturday having left Ulaanbaatar, the Mongolia capital, a day earlier.

He had been trapped in Mongolia for 16 months and was overstaying a tourist visa, a situation which made it impossible to secure work, get his travel documents in order or afford a flight home.

"I'm very happy to have gained freedom leaving Mongolia," he told Al Jazeera. "I didn't believe I'd be in Nigeria on Saturday. I didn't believe it. Now, I'm experiencing so many things in Nigeria. Fresh air, fresh food. I'm really happy."

Al Jazeera reported on his plight in August and the challenges faced by many other aspiring African footballers who are stranded in several countries, having been duped by people posing as agents and tricking them into paying significant sums to travel and play for foreign clubs.

In Afolabi's case, a Nigerian man who lived close to his home spun him a tale, took his savings and sent him to play for local Mongolian club Western Khovd FC, but the job did not last beyond his tourist visa and he quickly fell into serious financial and personal problems.

Christopher Hannah, a Scottish businessman who had lived in Mongolia for six months, read and empathised with Afolabi's story and volunteered to help him.

"I had come across Moshood two weeks before I contacted him. I saw the article on Al Jazeera and at the time I was in Scotland," Hannah told Al Jazeera.

"I flew back to Mongolia and I saw it posted again on a forum and I remember someone was asking, 'Why doesn't someone help this guy?'"

Hannah, who was working on setting up a cashmere business in the East Asian country, had previous experience in the football industry and a passion for the sport.

He was previously an image rights agent for several European football clubs and footballers.

"Football is one of the best ways to break communication or culture barriers. This was the main reason Moshood and I could come together," he said.

After the Nigerian footballer spent a week in detention in late September at the Mongolian immigration service, Hannah booked and paid for Afolabi's $900 flight home, while Afolabi's friend Wael, an Egyptian immigrant, gave him the $750 he needed to pay to Mongolia for overstaying his visa.

"I felt sad because I hadn't experienced it in my life to be in a detention room for seven days," said Afolabi. "For the first three days in detention, I was drinking water, fasting and praying to Almighty Allah to save me."

Hannah claimed that his life in Mongolia took a turn for the worse after he helped Afolabi, saying he was treated with hostility by locals and was eventually denied a business visa extension.

He has now returned to his native Scotland and is in the process of opening a new football agency focusing on regions such as Africa.
Up to thousands of scammed African footballers

It is not clear exactly how many hopeful African players are stranded across the world but according to some estimates, the number is in the thousands.

In 2017, there was an influx of more than 100 African talents to Nepal, a south Asian country known least for football.

British media reported that an estimated 15,000 players are trafficked to Europe annually.

In Russia, there are dozens of cases.

Beverley Agbakoba Onyejianya, a Nigerian sports lawyer, said being deported can seriously impact a person's state of mind.

"Being deported may leave a footballer being stigmatised and even anxious about their future opportunities and ability to earn a good income," she said. "The player's career may or may not be affected depending on how they work to find new opportunities."

Back at home and reflecting on his journey, Afolabi says he will continue to play his beloved sport.

"Football is my passion," he said. "I want to use football to help my family and other people that do not have the means. I believe I'll make it in football and I want to continue."

By Tolu Olasoji

Al Jazeera

Nigeria arrest 'fake first lady'

A woman who used various false identities to gain access to Nigeria's presidential complex to allegedly run business scams has been arrested.

The secret service said Amina Mohammed initially posed as Kogi state's first lady to gain entry to the presidential villa in the capital, Abuja.

She then allegedly invited people to the villa making them believe it was at the invitation of the president's wife.

At a press briefing about the arrest, Ms Mohammed shouted: "It is a lie."

Peter Afunanya, a spokesman for Nigeria's domestic spy agency, known as the Department of State Security (DSS), told reporters the scandal took place while First Lady Aisha Buhari was out of the country in November 2017.

Wealthy businessman Alexander Chika Okafor, invited to the the presidential villa by Ms Mohammed, accused her of defrauding him of 150m naira ($414,000, £323,000) over a property deal in the main city, Lagos, the secret service spokesman said.

"Investigation has shown that this unholy enterprise is not to the knowledge of the first lady," Mr Afunanya said.

Ms Mohammed "took advantage of the fact that personalities such as first ladies, ministers and certain categories of officials are not taken through rigorous protocols and security checks at the villa posts", he added.

The BBC's Ishaq Khalid in Abuja says the security breach is shocking as the presidential complex, known as Aso Rock, is well guarded by the DSS and police officers.

All staff working there have to have passes, that include biometric data, and all visitors need to be signed in, he says.

In September, the DSS arrested one of the first lady's aides for allegedly raising funds under false pretences. He denies the allegations.

President Muhammadu Buhari, who faces re-election in February, came into office promising to tackle the "enormous" scale of corruption in Nigeria.

BBC

Nigerian internet scammers targeting corporate email accounts

West Africa’s infamous internet scammers have evolved, dropping their impersonations of online love interests, princes and U.S. soldiers in favor of hijacking corporate emails, costing businesses hundreds of millions of dollars a year.

It is a much more lucrative venture that works by gaining access to corporate email login details or passing off almost-identical addresses as the real deal, a scam known as Business Email Compromise (BEC), according to a report by cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike issued on Thursday.

These Nigerian rackets now dwarf other types of online criminal theft, amounting to at least $5.3 billion of losses between October 2013 and the end of 2016, said CrowdStrike and the U.S. FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3).

“There’s a disproportionate amount of criminal gains they get from it,” Adam Meyers, vice president of intelligence at California-based CrowdStrike, told Reuters. “The lion’s share of ill-gotten, fraudulent money is around these business email compromise attacks. It’s a huge problem for our customer set.”

Nigeria has become one of the hubs of BEC. Nigerian online fraudsters, known as “Yahoo boys”, became notorious for trying to pass themselves off as people in financial need or Nigerian princes offering an outstanding return on an investment.

The capers became known as “419 scams” after the section of the national penal code that dealt - ineffectively - with fraud.

Yahoo boys even impersonated a U.S. forces commander in Afghanistan to defraud people by asking for help in recovering the assets of deceased soldiers. It forced the commander to issue a Facebook statement saying he would never try to contact anyone asking for financial help.

Now the scammers have bigger fish to fry, with the potential gains amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars a year, according to CrowdStrike.

Behind the fraudsters is an organized crime network with its hands in human trafficking, drugs, prostitution, money laundering and email fraud and cybercrime, the CrowdStrike report said. “The magnitude of this criminal threat has only recently begun to be understood,” it said.

The Black Axe gang sprang from Nigerian universities and now extends from Africa to North America, Europe and Asia. Its targets have ranged from semiconductor makers to schools in U.S. states including Connecticut and Minnesota, passing themselves off as executives and lawyers to trick employees into wiring sometimes millions of dollars a day into bank accounts.

From there, the money is quickly laundered through a series of bank accounts that can be traced to Hong Kong and China, where the trail often goes cold because diverging regulations foil monitoring, CrowdStrike’s Meyers said.

With that money, the Nigerian scammers are often enjoying the high life, said Meyers, noting social media accounts filled with pictures of them posing with luxury Mercedes cars, gold watches, jewellery and champagne.

“It’s really hard to stop; you can’t stop it with anti-virus or any kind of software, it’s really kind of a human problem.”

Reuters