A romance scammer having ties with a Nigerian crime syndicate worked from North Texas and lured elderly victims across the country.
A Horrendous Crime
A 36-year-old Nigerian man named Emanuel Stanley Orji was sentenced to three years in prison by Chief U.S. District Judge David Godbey. He is also supposed to pay a whopping amount of $418,030 for all that he gathered conning his victims.
The U.S. Attorney for North Texas, named Leigha Simonton said on Tuesday, the 10th of January, that Orji had pleaded guilty of fraud back in September. He was charged with around 10 other scammers after the FBI began a massive investigation in September ‘21.
His brother, 38-year-old Frederick Orji, had apparently pleaded guilty to the same crimes, to conspiracy to commit wire fraud in September 2022, received the same sentence in December, and was sentenced on Jan. 9, 2023 after the officials at the Federal Bureau of Investigation found that the organization that the Orji’s worked for, ran from the 14th of January, 2017 till 11th of July, 2017.
The operation scammed the elderly citizens of hundreds of dollars, often emptying the victim’s entire life savings. pleaded guilty The documents presented in the court show that the Orji brothers and the others involved in this gruesome scam, seized the attention of elders, specifically those who were divorced or estranged from their partners in one way or another in Michigan and California. The accused suspects created fake profiles on fake dating sites looking for their prey.
The Extravagant Storytelling
After having established themselves as peculiar identities vastly different from their own truth, they knitted fake stories about how they needed money for taxes, to pay off debt, merely travel, or even to fight custody battles. This led to the victims trusting and pitying them. Once they had garnered their trust, they conned them tens of thousands of dollars at one go. The banks they used were Arlington and DeSoto. In documents presented to the court, the Orji’s had confessed to the fact that once they had finished extracting money from all their victims’ accounts, they stopped talking to them. Five other people are accused along with the Orji brothers in this case. An estimate by the FBI confirms that more than 20,000 people have lost a total sum of $ 500 million since 2020.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Dallas Field Office, Homeland Security Investigations Dallas Field Office, and IRS – Criminal Investigation led all the aforesaid investigations after getting sufficient assistance from the Department of Labor Office of Inspector General, U.S. Citizenship & Immigration Services, and the U.S. Department of State’s Diplomatic Security Service (DSS). After an intensive investigation, all the accused have been taken into custody and strict action against them has begun.
After this case came into the limelight, Tinder, Match, Hinge, and a few other dating sites have put up a public awareness campaign to make sure the daters know how to use the sites in a safe and secure manner as well as stay away from online frauds of all kinds. Starting from the 10th of January, users of these sites along with a few others will begin to receive messages that alert them on figuring out how to differentiate between a genuine consumers and scammers.
