By JOSH MITCHELL
Editor
River Mississippi News
Dozens of States Affected; 800 Fake Email Addresses
Stole U.S. Taxpayer Money Intended for Citizens Faced With Lost Jobs, Health During Covid-19 Medical Disaster
Intricate Fraud Network Used ‘Money Mules,’ Fake Bank Accounts to Secretly Move Stolen Money
More Defendants: Fatiu Ismaila Lawal Awaits Extradition from Canada to Face U.S. Judge in Federal Fraud Case
More Schemes: Small Business Administration, Internal Revenue Service also targeted by criminals: FBI
A man without U.S. citizenship will go to prison for nearly four years for aggravated identity theft related to defrauding the White House’s National Covid-19 Preparedness Plan launched several years ago in the wake of the pandemic, which killed an estimated 1.17 million people nationally between 2020 and 2024, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data tracker.
Nigerian citizen Sakiru Olanrewaju Ambali, 45, hijacked and exploited the identities of over 630 U.S. citizens to steal more than $1 million in taxpayer dollars, which were supposed to help everyday Americans support themselves and their families as millions of people lost jobs, faced major and costly health scares, all while adapting to a world of forced and confusing isolationism, including children going to school remotely while parents worked to fit these changing routines into their daily schedules, which were already severely altered by the vast and deathly sickness that spread across the nation and much of the world.
Ambali, while a citizen of Nigeria, perpetrated this series of financially motivated identify theft crimes against citizens from his home in Canada, according to a Thursday news release from the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Western District of Washington in Tacoma.
Ambali thieved the more than $1 million in U.S. tax money allocated by Congress for sick and unemployed American afflicted by the Covid-19 pandemic, which brought a frantic rollout of vaccines with various levels of success and growing skepticism from the American public, coupled with soaring inflation, which has defined the nation’s economy and consumer sentiment since the pandemic was officially declared over about a year ago in the United States.
Ambali, according to U.S. Attorney Tessa M. Gorman, was arrested over a year ago in Frankfurt, Germany on his way back to Canada from his home country of Nigeria. U.S. District Judge Robert J. Bryan is quoted in the news release as saying, “It is clear that this involved a long series of serious fraudulent conduct.”
Ambali seized control of the identities of more than 600 people in the United States to suck away “more than $1 million in pandemic unemployment benefits,” the release adds. This created countless hardships for U.S. families and other residents who “legitimately needed benefits and found someone had already filed a claim,” said U.S. Attorney Gorman in the release.
This had real world impacts on people beyond the theft of over $1 million in taxpayer money — it also fouled up an already confusing, complex and quickly assembled program that was hurriedly approved by Congress, ostensibly as a way to help people living in fear for their very lives after the unprecedented human pandemic in the USA, which still has unknown origins.
Washington State was forced to stop paying claims for a period of time due to the nefariously obstructive actions of someone from Nigeria who perpetrated the vast fraud from a home in Canada, according to information derived from the U.S. Attorney’s Office news release.
Moreover, a codefendant, Fatiu Ismaila Lawal, also 45, worked alongside Ambali to use “stolen identities of thousands of workers to submit over 1,700 claims for pandemic unemployment benefits to over 25 different states, including Washington State.
“In total, the claims sought approximately $25 million, but the conspirators obtained approximately $2.4 million, primarily from pandemic unemployment benefits.”
Ambali’s restitution for defrauding the U.S. health program’s financial coffers through the stolen identities of U.S. residents is just over $1 million. The fraudsters allegedly submitted pandemic unemployment benefit claims to the states of New York, Maryland, Michigan, Nevada, California, Washington and some 19 other states.
They used 13 Google accounts to file around 900 claims and made up four Internet domains as tools to defraud the people who were truly entitled to those benefits during the deadly pandemic, which killed people from across all age ranges, genders and races in the USA, while simultaneously gutting the economy, driving up political division and disrupting social, school and work lives like never before in this country, according to information in the news release and from the CDC.
Additionally, the criminal defendants made up 800 email addresses to ensure the fraud went undetected, authorities added. Ambali was also caught in various other criminal scams aimed at pilfering the U.S. government and the citizens of this country around this time period, including schemes against the Internal Revenue Service and the Small Business Administration.
Further, they transferred the fraudulently obtained taxpayer money by sending the stolen Covid-19 funds to “money mules,” who then awaited additional orders from bosses, leading to the openings of bank accounts formed in the names of people whose identities had been unknowingly taken from them, according to information from the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Washington State.
Ambali for five years will still be under supervised release after completing the nearly four years confined in prison, Judge Bryan ordered during the Thursday sentencing hearing in Tacoma. And it was also made clear by the judge that Ambali shall not be permitted to enter the USA without first obtaining permission from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security following the sentence’s terminus.
In other matters related to his sprawling case of unprecedented U.S. medical fraud, another defendant, Fatiu Ismaila Lawal, was contained by authorities in Canada about a year ago and is waiting transport back to the USA to face criminal medical fraud charges in federal court.
