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A Nigerian national has been arrested and is facing an eight-count indictment related to business email compromise (BEC) charges that caused a charitable organization in the United States to lose more than $7.5 million.
The Nigerian hacker Olusegun Samson Adejorin has been charged with wire fraud, aggravated identity theft and unauthorized access to a protected computer, after stealing $7.5m from a New York-based charity.
He has purchased a credential harvesting tool in order to steal email login credentials from employees at this charity and a second charitable organization that provided investment services to it, based in North Bethesda, Maryland.
Adejorin then allegedly posed as an employee of the New York charity to request the second organization withdraw funds and send them to an account under his control.
Although withdrawals of this type over $10,000 required approval from at least one of several individuals authorized by the Maryland investment services charity, he still managed to persuade it to transfer millions of dollars in this way.
Adejorin used classic BEC techniques including registering spoofed domain names and concealing fraudulent emails by moving them to “an inconspicuous location” in the mailbox.
The hacker is facing a maximum sentence of 20 years in federal prison for each of five counts of wire fraud, as well as a maximum of five years for unauthorized access to a protected computer and a mandatory two-year sentence for each of the two counts of aggravated identity theft.
Adejorin was arrested in Ghana on December 29 2023, and is being detained pending a first court appearance in the West African nation.
