Last week the case of Valentine FOMBE was finally brought to a close. FOMBE was sentenced to 144 months in Federal prison and ordered to pay $325,856 in restitution to victims of Business Email Compromise scams that he conducted from 2016 to 2018. The various court documents present nearly as many puzzles as the sentence answers. Chief among them, what happened to the co-conspirators? and why have they not also been sentenced?
The indictment against FOMBE, OWOLABI, and ADEOYE demonstrates that they conducted Business Email Compromise #BEC scams against businesses in California, Tennessee, Michigan, Hawaii, Illinois, and California, as well as Check fraud against the Home Equity Line of Credit #HLOC accounts of some residents of Florida, Hawaii, and California.
The scams ran from 2016 until 2019 using many shell accounts established by FOMBE and his crew. FOMBE is from Cameroon and came to the US in 2013. In May 2016 he began conspiring with Bernadette ATTIA and Gbenga OWOLABI to conduct BEC scams. Homeland Security Investigations stated that the attempted losses were $2,036,064 from at least 22 victims and actual losses were $547,310.23 to 11 victim individuals and businesses, with many other identity theft victims.
The indicment and assorted court documents are full of communications between the parties such as this one, where an unnamed co-conspirator and FOMBE discuss opening a new PayPal account and a “Sunny” (which is a SunTrust bank account.)
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