Instagram star Hushpuppi, accused of £100m football fraud plot, faces US court
▶ Alleged money-laundering gang expected as much as £5m in a week
Social media personality Ramon Abbas is accused in the US of a plot to hit an English Premier League football club in a £100 million (Dh461m) fraud.
Abbas, a Nigerian businessman known to millions of Instagram followers as Hushpuppi, was said to have duped victims around the world in online heists worth hundreds of millions of dollars, US court documents said.
The 37-year-old was arrested in Dubai last month and extradited to the US, where he was accused of money laundering for a gang involved in hacking corporate emails and directing payments to accounts they controlled.
He was allegedly involved in laundering the proceeds of scams worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
He was identified on the phone contacts list of an unnamed conspirator as Billionaire Gucci Master, the documents said.
The gang’s targets included the unidentified football club, the oldest bank on the island of Malta, and a company based in Edinburgh that they tried to defraud of £200m.
It was not clear if the attempted frauds of the football club and the Scottish company were successful, but some of the efforts to transfer money from the Maltese bank appeared to have failed, according to messages between the accused plotters.
Abbas was arrested last month with another Nigerian, Olalekan Jacob Ponle, known as Woodberry, and 10 other men. Dubai police confiscated 13 luxury cars, computers and smartphones.
Mr Ponle was also charged in the US. He was accused of wire fraud, ripping off several USbased companies and stealing tens of millions of dollars. Both men face decades in prison if they are convicted.
Abbas’s address was given in US court documents as a residence at the five-star Palazzo Versace hotel in Dubai. The complex on Dubai Creek is described on its website as “truly symbolic of the Versace lifestyle”.
He was to appear in an Illinois court today, charged with conspiracy to launder money secured from the cyber crimes that netted the criminals vast sums.
Investigators highlighted Hushpuppi’s wealthy lifestyle in the UAE that he flaunted on Instagram, where he had 2.3 million followers.
They included pictures of himself in June with a white Rolls Royce Cullinan that included the hashtag #AllMine.
Four months earlier, he posted a photo of himself in front of two cars, including a Rolls Royce Wraith.
The starting price of each car was about $330,000 (Dh1.21m), according to an FBI investigator.
Abbas was also pictured with Ferraris, Bentleys, inside private jets and wearing expensive watches and designer clothes.
Court filings accused him of involvement in a scam to launder €13m (Dh54.1m) fraudulently transferred from Malta’s Bank of Valletta to accounts around the world.
The bank, the oldest on the Mediterranean island, closed its branches, ATM machines and website after discovering the attempted hack.
Employees uncovered the problem as they tallied international transfers and sought to reclaim the money, according to reports.
Abbas provided details for two accounts in Romania and Bulgaria that could each receive €5m from the scam, a review of phone messages between Abbas and his unnamed co-conspirator showed.
The messages revealed that the two men discussed whether the transfer had been successful after the money failed to show up in the Romanian account.
The second man told Abbas: “Brother, we still have access and they didn’t realise, we gonna shoot again tomorrow AM.”
The plotters were frustrated after employees got wind of the plot and the attempted heist was made public.
The second man sent an image of a news report detailing the theft of funds from the bank. “Look, it hit the news,” he wrote.
Abbas replied: “Damn.” “Next one is in a few weeks. Will let U [sic] know when it’s ready. To[o] bad they caught on or it would have been a nice payout,” the second man wrote.
The court documents suggested that Abbas was struggling to keep up with the demand to open new bank accounts in Mexico and Europe to receive millions of dollars from the US and UK scams.
Abbas’s alleged co-conspirator told him in 2019 that he was working with hackers who could obtain between $1m and $5m once or twice a week after hacking into the email accounts of senior company executives.
“I have other companies ready to swap bro – pls help me out I am losing millions,” the second man told Abbas in May last year.
Once they had successfully taken on the identity of an executive, they sent messages to company staff telling them to transfer money to fake bank accounts that were under the control of the Nigerian scam operators.
The money was then transferred out of the accounts – some of it into bitcoin – before the businesses realised what was happening.
Instagram star Ramon Abbas is alleged to have laundered hundreds of millions of illegally acquired dollars