The U.S. Fish and 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 federal officials, authorities said.
Pretending to be Fish and Wildlife Service employees, they emailed the Wildlife for Everyone Endowment Foundation and ordered the Pennsylvania nonprofit to write checks to people identified in the emails as government contractors or consultants.
The nonprofit, which has received hundreds of thousands of dollars in Fish and Wildlife Service grants over the years, submitted requests to the U.S. Treasury for the funds and then disbursed the funds 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, as 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 for the Middle District of 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 did not 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 that the Wildlife for Everyone Endowment Foundation has worked with the Fish and Wildlife Service at least since 2008, the last year available in the USASpending.gov database. The foundation received its largest grant in 2022, for $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 money mules. One was a Pennsylvania resident identified in court documents as JB. Mr. Udugba was 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 federal funds to money mules based in Pennsylvania, New York and Louisiana.
No attorney has 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 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 the system, prosecutors charged. Once it had the funds, it paid the money mules.
Nigerian scammers, known in-country as “Yahoo Boys,” have become something of a known phenomenon 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, wrote that 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 Ayodeji Anibaba with siphoning money from Norfolk, Virginia. Authorities said he and his confederates used a romance scam to recruit women ages 20 to 30 to receive money he was moving through 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 from August 2019 to July 2020.
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