The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service fell victim to Nigerian fraudsters, according to federal prosecutors, who said the agency paid out more than $300,000 in bogus bills.
The Nigerians combined two classic frauds — the romance scam and the business email compromise scam — to fool the feds, authorities said.
Pretending to be Fish & Wildlife Service employees, they emailed the Wildlife for Everyone Endowment Foundation and ordered the Pennsylvania nonprofit to write checks to people whose names were in the emails as government contractors or consultants.
The nonprofit, which has received hundreds of thousands of dollars in Fish & Wildlife Service grants over the years, submitted requests to the U.S. Treasury for the funds and then paid them to the contractors, authorities said.
However, the contractors were actually “money mules” — unsuspecting people recruited on dating websites and then fooled into serving as conduits for laundering ill-gotten funds.
Prosecutors charged Okeoghene Patrick Udugba, 45, a Nigerian citizen, with being a U.S.-based organizer for the scam.
“Udugba and others utilized social media and dating websites to meet and establish purported romantic relationships with persons in multiple states,” the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Scranton, Pennsylvania, said in announcing the case. “Those persons were groomed and ultimately used by Udugba and others as money mules to receive and cash fraudulently obtained checks.”
Investigators tracked the emails, which were sent using “spoofed” addresses, to Nigeria.
The Fish and Wildlife Service didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment.
A woman who answered the phone at the Pennsylvania nonprofit declined to comment and immediately hung up upon hearing the caller was a reporter.
Government spending records show the Wildlife for Everyone Endowment Foundation has worked with the Fish & Wildlife Service at least since 2008, which is the last year available in the USAspending database. Its biggest grant came in 2022, when it received $730,000 to restore streams and wetlands in Pennsylvania.
Authorities said in their indictment against Mr. Udugba that the scammers used a profile named James Cowan on the dating website Plenty of Fish to lure in money mules. One was a Pennsylvania resident identified in court documents as JB. Mr. Udugba is accused of helping groom JB to receive payments on behalf of James Cowan.
On March 12, 2024, the scammers sent a “spoofed” email from Nigeria purporting to be from a Fish and Wildlife Service employee. The email directed the nonprofit to pay $30,900 to JB, who was identified as a consultant being reimbursed for federal work.
JB then obtained a cashier’s check for $29,400, payable to Slick Solutions LLC. Prosecutors said he mailed the check to Mr. Udugba at an address in Hamburg, Iowa.
All told, the nonprofit paid $423,612 in taxpayers’ funds to money mules based in Pennsylvania, New York and Louisiana.
No lawyer has yet been listed in court documents for Mr. Udugba.
The indictment says the Wildlife for Everyone Endowment Foundation was able to make payments on the federal account because, as a Fish and Wildlife Service grantee, it had access to the federal Automated Standard Application for Payments.
When it received the emails from Nigeria approving payments for the bogus contractors and consultants, Wildlife for Everyone submitted reimbursement requests through ASAP, prosecutors charge. Once it had the funds, it then paid the money mule.
Nigerian scammers, known in-country as “Yahoo Boys,” have become a bit of a cliche at this point, given the prevalence of their activities.
In a 2024 paper, Suleman Lazarus, a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics, and Adebayo Benedict Soares, a financial crimes prosecutor in Nigeria, said they examined 50 cases and found the U.S. to be the most popular target and women to be the victims of choice. The perpetrators were male and mostly young university students.
Other governments have also fallen victim to Nigerian scammers.
In a 2023 case, federal prosecutors charged Habeeb Adodeji Anibaba with siphoning money from Norfolk, Virginia. Authorities said he and his confederates used a romance scam to recruit women between 20 and 30 years old to receive money he was moving around from his accounts.
In reality, the money was coming from Norfolk’s SunTrust Bank account. Prosecutors said the scammers arranged 900 payouts, stealing $1.3 million from the city between Aug. 19 and July 2020.
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