A Nigerian national was sentenced to 95 months in prison for his role in a money laundering conspiracy involving millions of dollars tied to various fraud schemes - including business email compromise, romance, and unemployment insurance fraud scams - perpetrated against U.S. citizens.
According to court documents, Oluwasegun Baiyewu, 40, of Houston, Texas, led a conspiracy that laundered over $3.1 million in proceeds of various fraud schemes by purchasing used cars with illicit proceeds and then shipping those cars to West Africa. Between approximately May 2020 and October 2021, Baiyewu worked with at least six other co-conspirators in the United States and Nigeria. Using encrypted messaging applications, such as WhatsApp, Baiyewu and his co-conspirators coordinated the receipt and use of illicit money to purchase salvaged cars and then ship them to Nigeria.
In one instance, Baiyewu conspired to launder funds obtained from a business email compromise scheme perpetrated against a Puerto Rican renewable energy company, which was tricked into sending approximately $280,000 by wire to bank accounts controlled by fraudsters and money launderers. Baiyewu then worked with his co-conspirators to launder the Puerto Rican company's money by paying toward the purchase of cars located in the United States that he arranged to export and ship to Nigeria to benefit the co-conspirators. A federal jury convicted Baiyewu in August 2025 of one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering.
The Department of Justice's Criminal Division, through its Cyber-Enabled Scam Initiative (CSI), works to disrupt and stop cyber-enabled criminal networks that prey on Americans - from investment and crypto scams to romance and inheritance fraud. The U.S. Postal Inspection Service, U.S. Department of Labor Office of Inspector General, and FBI San Juan Cyber Task Force investigated the case.
The scheme ran on two rails: a compromised communication channel to redirect the money, and a physical pipeline to launder it. It is part of why Vulpine insists on as little personal data as possible: an account is a token shown once and stored only as a hash, there is no email chain to intercept and no wire-transfer workflow to impersonate - which is precisely the surface schemes like this one monetize.