A Nigerian influencer known as “Hushpuppi”, who gained numerous followers for flaunting luxury cars and designer clothes on Instagram, has been sentenced to more than 11 years in prison for his involvement in a sprawling network of million-dollar money laundering schemes.
On Monday, a federal judge in Los Angeles sentenced the Lagos-born Ramon Abbas to 135 months in federal prison, with officials describing the online scammer as “one of the most prolific money launderers in the world.”
“Abbas leveraged his social media platforms – where he amassed a considerable following – to gain notoriety and to brag about the immense wealth he acquired by conducting business email compromise scams, online bank heists and other cyber-enabled fraud that financially ruined scores of victims and provided assistance to the North Korean regime,” Don Alway, the assistant director of the FBI’s Los Angeles field office, said in a statement on Monday.
Abbas pleaded guilty in April 2021 to one count of conspiracy to engage in money laundering, after being arrested in Dubai in June of 2020.
Officials said the Nigerian, who portrayed himself as a glitzy real estate developer online, ran laundering schemes across the world, including attempting to move money North Korean hackers stole from a Maltese bank in 2019, and fraudulently convincing a New York law firm to wire nearly $1m to a bank account of a co-conspirator.
“By his own admission, during just an 18-month period defendant conspired to launder over $300 million,” prosecutors wrote in a court filing as part of the sentencing.
As part of his punishment, Hushpuppi will have to pay over $1.7m in restitution to his victims.
The high-flying scammer, who lived in the exclusive, Italian-designed Palazzo Versace in Dubai, is already serving separate federal charges with a sentence of nearly 12 years, after pleading guilty in November 2020 to one count of conspiracy to engage in money laundering.
Abbas got his start as a “Yahoo boy,” Nigerian slang for fraudsters who steal or create identities online and use them to steal money from unwitting online correspondents, the BBC reports.
He frequently posed with expensive Rolls Royce and Bentley cars, wearing high-priced designer clothing.
"Thank you, Lord, for the many blessings in my life,” he captioned one Instagram post, weeks before he got arrested. “Continue to shame those waiting for me to be shamed.”
