Nigerian student jailed in US for defrauding 17 companies of $3.7m

A court in the United States has sentenced a Nigerian student, Amechi Amuegbunam for four years for his role in an email phishing scam.

The 30-year-old student was reportedly involved in an email fraud otherwise known as Business Email Compromise, which caused US companies to lose $3.7m loss.

According to Punch, the convict and his accomplices were said to have sent fraudulent emails to companies in Texas between November 2013 and August 2015.

Reports say Amuegbunam's method involves sending an email containing misrepresentations to companies instructing them to wire transfer funds as contained in a PDF document attached to the email.

His method also involves tricking the employees of the companies to wire him money by transposing a couple of letters in the email of the companies.

Having scammed 17 companies in North Texas, Amuegbunam was thereafter arrested in 2015 in Baltimore and was charged for phishing scams.

One of the victim companies in Texas, Luminant Corp reportedly lost $100,000 to the scheme.

An employee of Luminant Corp who has an authority to wire money in the company reportedly received an email from someone to wire money.

However, instead of the mail to carry luminant.com, two letters were transposed and the employee was deceived with a different domain name- lumniant.com <http://lumniant.com> and he wired $98,550 to a bank account outside Texas.

Amuegbunam, 30, has therefore been ordered to pay $615, 555.12 in restitution for his role in email fraud.

The Federal Bureau of Information's investigation in conjunction with Economic and Financial Crimes Commission EFCC led to the arrest of the Amuegbunam.

The FBI has, therefore, commended the EFCC, for helping in bringing Amuegbunam to justice.