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Nigerian cybercrime ring makes Lanka as base to defraud overseas companies
Sri Lanka’s detectives have busted a multimillion dollar international cyber crime ring run by a group of Nigerians operating from Colombo and posing off as businessmen.
Criminal Investigation Department officers said they had arrested 15 Nigerians who had allegedly been siphoning off millions of dollars from the bank accounts of several overseas companies.
The CID launched its investigation into the hacking scam following a complaint from the Central Bank’s Financial Intelligence Unit.
The unit was alerted by its overseas counterparts which said they suspected that a crime syndicate based in Sri Lanka was behind the flow of funds from the accounts of certain Asian companies to accounts in Sri Lankan banks. The victim companies include those from China, Malaysia and Indonesia.
Working on the information, a special CID team arrested the alleged kingpin of the racket — a Nigerian national. The detectives said that the records of the Registrar of Companies in Colombo showed that the suspect had 15 companies registered under his name. Investigations revealed that the companies had fake addresses and had only two shareholders — the suspect and a Sri Lankan, who was listed as a director. The Sri Lankan partner has also been arrested.
The CID is still probing several bank accounts allegedly maintained by the suspect. The detectives said they found Rs.100 million in these accounts.
The investigations have revealed that the suspect had created fake emails and misled the victim companies into believing that he was the party with whom the companies had entered into business transactions. The suspect would then request the victim company to send the money to his accounts in Sri Lankan banks. Once deposited, these funds would be withdrawn and routed to accounts in Nigeria, using bank accounts of Sri Lankans.
Further investigations had led to the arrest of 10 more Nigerians who had worked for the ringleader.
The detectives said the ten suspects had come to Sri Lanka on student visas. Two of them were even studying information technology at a reputed institute in Malabe.
One of the tasks of the 10 Nigerian suspects was to obtain ‘retired’ SIM cards from communication centres. A SIM card that remains unused for a long period after it has been bought is referred to as a ‘retired’ SIM card. Foreign racketeers use such SIM cards, registered under Sri Lankans, as a red-herring.
The Nigerians, the detectives said, had duped several Sri Lankans, mostly young students, into buying these SIM cards on their behalf.
The suspects had allegedly also tricked several Sri Lankans, again mostly students, into believing that they were running a legitimate mobile phone business and had even convinced them to provide their personal bank account details. The Nigerians had then used those same accounts to channel money stolen through cyber hacking to accounts in Nigeria.
The detectives said some locals might have taken part unwittingly in the scam, but they could still be charged with aiding and abetting a crime since it was their bank accounts that had been used to funnel stolen funds. Police are also likely to take action against communication centres which had sold ‘retired’ SIM cards, without following proper procedures.
The detectives said the suspects had also carried out a parallel scam – with which many cyber criminals have duped millions of people since emails became a mode of communication in the 1990s. Their target was young Sri Lankan women. They would inform the women via email that they had won millions of rupees in a lottery and request them to deposit a certain amount of money in a given bank account to claim their prize money. About 20 women have come forward to tell police that they had sent money to the racketeers’ accounts.
Police are warning the public to be cautious of such racketeers and not to become unwitting victims of foreign criminals. They request the public not to give any foreign national information about their bank accounts and not to let such persons use their cell phones or credit cards. Those renting out rooms to foreign nationals are also being asked to double check their passports and visas, and to immediately report to police if they see anything suspicious.
| The end of the US$ 60m scam In August last year, the international media, including the Atlantic magazine, the Independent and Russia Today, reported the arrest of a 40-year-old Nigerian man behind one of the world’s most well-known online scams. The arrest, in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, made through a joint-operation between Interpol and the Nigerian Economic and Financial Crime Commission (EFCC), marked the end of a worldwide fraud network that had made more than $60 million, Interpol said in a statement. The mastermind behind the scam, who used the alias “Mike,” led a network of at least 40 people spanning Nigeria, Malaysia, and South Africa, with additional contacts in China, Europe, and the United States. Police did not say how long the network has been active. His operations included two types of scams—payment-diversion fraud and CEO fraud. In the former, the network hacked businesses’ emails and sent fake messages to clients with instructions for sending money to a bank account under the network’s control. In the latter, hackers breached a high-level executive’s email and sent fake requests asking for money to other employees. The EFCC found evidence that “Mike” was also involved in “romance scams,” in which hackers would elicit funds from victims using online profiles on dating sites and social media. Hundreds of people have fallen for these scams worldwide, Interpol said. One target was conned into paying $15.4 million. |