Nigerians In America--Making Nigeria Proud Every Day

The title is sarcastic by the way. There are many Nigerians in America that need to go and take a flying leap off a bridge because they make the rest of us look bad.

I just finished reading a CNN Fortune article titled, The King of Home Equity Fraud. If you haven't read it or heard about it, you should check it out. It makes for a good read, and guess what, the "king" is a Nigerian named Tobechi Onwuhara. He has been on the FBI most wanted list since 2008. I guess it was a slow news day over at CNN Fortune since they wrote this article only this week.

Onwuhara's story is like a movie script waiting to happen. In short, I have a feeling Nollywood will base a story on him very soon--if they haven't already. In a 3 year period this dude stole $44million dollars from high-income home mortgage equities across America. At least, this is the amount that the FBI is aware of. According to them, his total take might actually be about $80million to $100million depending on how long Onwuhara was really in business.

The thing that struck me is not that he is a scam artist--after all what else is new? It is the story and the way it is told like a book or a movie waiting to happen.

Some quotes from the article, 

It was an ideal environment for Onwuhara, 27, a brilliant, pug-faced visionary who favored True Religion jeans and Ed Hardy shirts. Looking out over the neon skyline of downtown Dallas, it was easy for the crew to believe his assurances: He'd make them rich. When the sun glinted off one of his $100,000 diamond-encrusted Audemars Piguet watches, who could doubt it? Every few months he would buy a new Maserati or Bentley. He owned expensive properties in Miami, Dallas, and Phoenix. He even had a secret love condo in the W, where scantily clad women visited in such numbers that one bellhop became convinced that the first-generation Nigerian-American was a porn director.

I've always hated guys in Ed Hardy. Now I know why.

On Onwuhara's lifestyle:

The Dallas Gentlemen's Club is one of Texas's bawdiest fleshpots, a highway-side warehouse of grinding booty and slack-jawed marks. The club attracts big spenders -- athletes, rap stars -- but Onwuhara made them look like flunkies. When he walked in, the strippers would beeline for him, their cellphones lighting up as they called their off-duty friends: "Get over here! T just showed up!" They knew what to expect -- $650 bottles of Cristal, $2,000 stacks of ones for his entourage, $50,000 in a briefcase he'd empty out. During a single song, he'd drop so much money the girls needed two more songs to scoop all the bills off the floor. He'd repeat this performance several times a week.

Onwuhara targeted rich people with large homes and large home equities. But as they say, everyday is for the thief, one day is for the owner. One of Onwuhara's targets, a former US Treasury Agent, realized that somebody had called his bank, pretending to be him, and transferred $280,000 to a Korean bank account. This Treasury agent was the wrong person to mess with, he called the cops, the secret service, the FBI, and the hunt was on.

The way they found out who was responsible for the missing money, ladies and gentlemen, is straight out of a work of fiction. After tracking the IP addresses that had logged into the agent's bank account, the phone numbers that had called the bank, etcetera, the FBI finally found out that Onwuhara was using an online phone re-routing thingamajig (read the article for more details) and Onwuhara's calls were being recorded by the online phone provider. The FBI spent hours listening to the recorded calls. The calls showed how the scammers convinced banks to transfer money from unsuspecting victims bank accounts, but the FBI still didn't known any real names of the scammers. Until one of the recorded phone calls:

In it, Onwuhara does a pitch-perfect impersonation of a middle-aged white doctor calling in a prescription to a CVS (CVS, Fortune 500) pharmacy. The prescription was for Valtrex, a herpes medication. The patient was Tobe Onwuhara. At last, investigators had a name. They pulled a Texas DMV photo of Onwuhara. It matched the image of the man in the hoodie from the Verizon video. Their quarry was in reach, but they needed more evidence.

Imagine that, brought down by a case of herpes. Guess if he hadn't been messing around with all those girls he wouldn't have needed a prescription.

From then on, the FBI began to follow Onwuhara and his crew as they gathered evidence for a case. Once, the FBI cooked up a plan to detain Onwuhara and his accomplices at JFK airport as they returned from a trip to Nigeria (probably went to spend Christmas at home in Umuahia). The FBI told Onwuhara that it was a routine security check, but the detention was actually to allow the FBI to record all of their voices to compare to the voices on the tapes.

Eventually, Onwuhara somehow figured out that the FBI had tapped his phone. He got rid of it, and started using a new one. When this happened, the FBI issued an emergency arrest warrant for Onwuhara in case he tried to flee and they continued to monitor his numerous homes in the south.

Onwuhara had a fiance, Precious Matthews, who was aware of his scamming activities and even helped him impersonate female account holders every once in a while. She enjoyed all the perks of being his fiance even though she knew all the money was illegal and that he was cheating on her with multiple women. Apparently they fought often, but she didn't want to give up her lifestyle and she didn't leave him. In the end, she actually helped Onwuhara escape while she was caught and arrested:

...on a perfect South Florida night, the agents watching Onwuhara's house noticed a commotion. Matthews ran outside, followed by a familiar-looking man. Matthews sped away in her Acura. The man followed in a black BMW X6 registered to Onwuhara. The agents gave chase as the cars rocketed down the highway at more than 100 mph...The agents on the ground followed the speeding cars to the Hard Rock Casino in Fort Lauderdale. The Acura and the BMW screeched to a halt at the curb in front of the casino. The drivers rushed inside, where local police detained them. The man from the BMW wasn't Onwuhara but rather his protégé, Ezenwa Onyedebelu. In the seconds before the FBI arrived with handcuffs to make the arrest, Matthews whipped out her cellphone and fired off a text: "Leave now. They got us."

You see this stupid female?

When Onwuhara got the text, he left the Hard Rock casino and the FBI have not found him since then.

That was August 2008.

I am almost certain he found his way back to Nigeria where he is probably living large on all the money he stashed away in foreign bank accounts. Meanwhile the FBI arrested all his crew members, and they were all found guilty of fraud and are now spending their days in prison.

Even if you are not going to read the entire article at CNN Fortune, you need to check out the comments section. Many of the Nigerians who commented on this article have called Onwuhara a genius and applaud his "success".

He is a "hero" to some people--the foolish ones. Instead of being ashamed there are Nigerians applauding.

Onwuhara is on the left, while his idiot protege is on the right. I wonder who these two girls are?

I don't believe Onwuhara is a genius. You don't have to be a genius to surround yourself with stupid people willing to break the law for you. Take his fiance and protege, they were willing to get caught so that he could escape. He used information that is readily available on the internet to get enough data together to impersonate people, you don't need to be a genius to do that. All you need is Google.

There is nothing smart in what he did. Nigerians need to get over this habit of applauding illegal "success". There are Onwuharas everywhere. We certainly have them in New York. They are the loudest at parties, the most obnoxious, the least educated, and always throwing money around, yet the women go after them and the men want to be them. Its ridiculous.