A Nigerian national who had been living in the United Arab Emirates has been sentenced to more than eight years in a US prison for his role in an $8 million cybercrime scheme.
The man, 31-year-old Olalekan Jacob Ponle, aka Mark Kain and Mr Woodbery, was involved in a business email compromise (BEC) scheme for at least nine months in 2019, while he was living in the UAE.
He was arrested in the UAE in June 2020 and extradited to the United States the next month. Earlier this year he pleaded guilty to a wire fraud charge and he has now been sentenced to eight years and four months in prison.
In addition, he will have to pay over $8 million in restitution to victims, and forfeit luxury cars and watches that he obtained using proceeds of the cybercrime scheme.
According to the US Justice Department, Ponle and his accomplices used phishing attacks to gain access to email accounts, which they then used to send fraudulent emails instructing victims to wire money to bank accounts they controlled.
Authorities say the cybercriminals attempted to obtain more than $51 million from targeted organizations, with actual losses exceeding $8 million.
Earlier this year, another Nigerian national, Solomon Ekunke Okpe, was sentenced to four years in a US prison for his role in a BEC operation.
Related: Russian Man Who Laundered Money for Ryuk Ransomware Gang Sentenced
Related: Former Ubiquiti Employee Who Posed as Hacker Sentenced to Prison
Related: British Twitter Hacker Sentenced to Prison in US
Eduard Kovacs (@EduardKovacs) is a managing editor at SecurityWeek. He worked as a high school IT teacher for two years before starting a career in journalism as Softpedia’s security news reporter. Eduard holds a bachelor’s degree in industrial informatics and a master’s degree in computer techniques applied in electrical engineering.
More from Eduard Kovacs
- CISA Warns of Old JBoss RichFaces Vulnerability Being Exploited in Attacks
- NIST Publishes Final Version of 800-82r3 OT Security Guide
- Johnson Controls Hit by Ransomware
- Verisoul Raises $3.25 Million in Seed Funding to Detect Fake Users
- Government Shutdown Could Bench 80% of CISA Staff
- Google Rushes to Patch New Zero-Day Exploited by Spyware Vendor
- macOS 14 Sonoma Patches 60 Vulnerabilities
- New GPU Side-Channel Attack Allows Malicious Websites to Steal Data
Latest News
- Bankrupt IronNet Shuts Down Operations
- AWS Using MadPot Decoy System to Disrupt APTs, Botnets
- Generative AI Startup Nexusflow Raises $10.6 Million
- In Other News: RSA Encryption Attack, Meta AI Privacy, ShinyHunters Hacker Guilty Plea
- Researchers Extract Sounds From Still Images on Smartphone Cameras
- National Security Agency is Starting an Artificial Intelligence Security Center
- CISA Warns of Old JBoss RichFaces Vulnerability Being Exploited in Attacks
- Hackers Set Sights on Apache NiFi Flaw That Exposes Many Organizations to Attacks
