A Nigerian social media influencer who called himself Ray Hushpuppi and flaunted a lavish lifestyle fuelled by money laundering has been sentenced to more than 11 years in a US prison.
Ramon Abbas, 40, was also ordered by a federal judge in Los Angeles to pay 1.7 million dollars (£1.48m) in compensation to two fraud victims, according to the US Department of Justice.
Abbas was “one of the most prolific money launderers in the world”, Don Alway, assistant director in charge of the FBI’s Los Angeles office, said.
Prosecutors said Abbas and a Canadian man laundered money from various online crimes including bank cyber heists and business email compromise (BEC), a prolific crime in which criminals hack into email accounts, pretend to be someone they are not and fool victims into wiring money where it does not belong.
In 2019, he helped launder some 14.7 million dollars (£12.8m) stolen by North Korean hackers from a bank in Malta, funnelling the money through banks in Romania and Bulgaria, prosecutors said.
He also helped launder millions of pounds stolen from a British company and a professional football club in the United Kingdom, got a New York-based law firm to transfer nearly 923,000 dollars (£806,000) to a criminal account and acknowledged in a plea agreement that he helped defraud someone in Qatar who sought a 15 million dollars (£13m) loan to build a school, federal prosecutors said.
On Monday, Abbas was sentenced to 135 months in federal prison and was ordered to pay 922,857 dollars in compensation to the law firm and 809,983 dollars (£706,000) to the victim in Qatar.
“By his own admission, during just an 18-month period defendant conspired to launder over 300 million dollars (£262m),” prosecutors wrote in a sentencing memorandum, although they said much of the intended loss “did not ultimately materialise”.
Abbas, under the name “Ray Hushpuppi”, had more than 2 million Instagram followers before he was arrested in 2020 in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates.
His social media posts showed him living a life of luxury, complete with private jets, ultra-expensive cars and high-end clothes and watches.
“I hope some day I will be inspiring more young people to join me on this path,” read one Instagram post by Abbas, who pleaded guilty in April 2021 to one count of conspiracy to engage in money laundering.
Ghaleb Alaumary, 37, of Mississauga in Ontario, Canada, was charged separately. He pleaded guilty in 2020 to one count of conspiracy to engage in money laundering, prosecutors said. He was sentenced to nearly 12 years in federal prison and was ordered to pay more than 30 million dollars (£26.2m) in restitution.
