28th January, 2011
A 32-year old man from Abia State, South-East Nigeria, has been declared wanted in the United States, after FBI investigators established that he had creamed off more than N15 billion ($100 million) from U.S. victims.
The suspect, Mr. Tobechi Onwuhara, described by US investigators as one of the world’s most successful cyber scammers, used his talents to filet a poorly regulated banking and credit system in the United States, according to CNN reports, quoting Fortune magazine.
While six of his accomplices in the United States have been arrested and sentenced, Tobechi escaped, the reports said. The FBI has placed a $25,000 (N3.7 million) bounty on his head, it was learnt.
Investigators discovered that Tobechi swindled his victims using computers, cell phones and internet.
He was exposed when on 8 December 2007 he withdrew $280,000 from an account belonging to Mr. Robert Short, a former US treasury agent who also worked in South Carolina as the Treasury Department national’s chief investigation. Short had spent 30 years on Capitol Hill as a politician. He was, in other words, the wrong man to hit.
After he noticed the illegal transaction, Short called the Alexandria police department, the Secret Service and the FBI. Within days, an investigation was underway.
Tobechi, with his accomplices, most of them Nigerians, did online research using databases and websites to harvest names, dates of birth, and mortgage information of their victims. They built profiles of victims and called banks posing as account holders.
The callers cadged security information and passwords. Then Tobechi breached the accounts and wire funds from them to a network of money mules he had established in Asia. The money would be laundered and wired back to his accounts in the U.S.
“I call it modern-day bank robbery,†said FBI special agent Michael Nail. “You can sit at home in your PJs and slippers with a laptop, and you can actually rob a bank.â€
Tobechi specialised in hitting home equity lines of credit (HELOCs), the reservoirs of cash that banks make available to homeowners.
Once Tobechi gained access to a HELOC, he could siphon out vast sums in seconds. His weapon was persuasion. It got him enough money to start building a colonnaded fortress in Nigeria; enough to gamble at the high-stakes tables in Vegas casinos all night. Even his accomplices appear not to have known how much he was really pulling down — not even his beautiful fiancée, Precious Matthews.
“He was playing all of us,†said Paula Gipson, a member of the crew. “The banks, us, Precious, everybody.â€
Conversations with Tobechi’s associates, interviews with his family and with investigators, and hundreds of pages of court documents revealed a digital scavenger of extraordinary creativity and guile.
Tobechi orchestrated his swindles using information about homeowners that is widely available online.
It was learnt that in fragments, this information is innocuous, but when assembled properly, it can be used like an electronic skeleton key to get into almost any credit account.
His father, Doris, was an entrepreneur, one of the first people in Nigeria to import satellite TVs. He built the first major hotel in Abia’s capital, Umuahia.
Visitors came from miles away to dance in the hotel’s nightclub. As Umuahia expanded and land values appreciated, so did Doris’s influence. He moved into politics, held office, and managed a successful campaign for a governor of Abia.
Tobechi’s mother, Katherine, was equally accomplished. A lawyer and literary critic, she served as chairwoman of Abia’s board of education.
The four daughters she had with Doris would go on to be nurses and ministers. But her fifth child, her only son, would be different. He would be American. Katherine was five months pregnant with Tobechi when she left Nigeria to attend school in Houston. “Tobe†was born there in 1979.
Katherine returned to Nigeria when Tobe was still a boy, leaving him with an uncle in Houston.
She thought the tight-knit diaspora would look after him. But once Tobe reached his teenage years he started skipping school and getting into trouble. The family shipped him back to Nigeria at age 15 and enrolled him in a boarding school run by the Marist Brothers, a Catholic order known for educational discipline.
Onwuhara graduated and enrolled in medical school at Abia State University. He was by all accounts an exceptionally clever, shy boy who spoke infrequently but eloquently. He longed to return to the U.S.
In 1999, Tobechi moved back to Texas. He rented an apartment in Dallas and took classes at Brookhaven College. He found a job as a loan officer at Capital One (COF, Fortune 500). He learned how banks worked from the inside, studying documents and procedures.
With the help of a friend who had connections at Discover Financial Services (DFS, Fortune 500), Tobechi cooked up driver’s licenses and credit cards under the names of real customers, according to court documents. He bought electronics at CompUSA. He hit up restaurants and clubs.
That was how he met Precious Matthews, a pretty Baylor student majoring in speech communication. Matthews worked as a waitress; Tobechi was a regular, flirtatious customer. When Precious warned him the establishment was suspicious of his transactions, Tobechi was smitten. The two started dating and were soon engaged.
In 2002, Tobechi was arrested three times in Texas for credit card fraud. The police raided his apartment and found incriminating evidence.
Tobechi had mastered some techniques of identity theft and stolen more than $100,000 with an accomplice, according to a statement he gave to the authorities, but he was still a fledgling criminal making silly mistakes.
Almost all of Tobechi’s co-conspirators were indicted and pleaded guilty. Precious Matthews was sentenced to 51 months in prison. Daniel “Orji†Orjinta got 42 months. Abel Nnabue had his sentence reduced to 27 months after cooperating with prosecutors. Paula Gipson and Ezenwa Onyedebelu helped prosecutors and had their sentences reduced to 15 months and 14 months, respectively. Only Henry Obilo pleaded not guilty. He was sentenced to 88 months in prison.
But, Tobechi who once said that “I was taught by my dad not to be a follower,†is still at large.
—Simon Ateba
