BEC Scammers: Hushpuppi & MrWoodbery - laundering millions

Over the past couple years I've found myself in the strange position of having nearly half of my Twitter followers residing in Nigeria. I've been seriously studying West African organized crime for a few years now, mostly trying to learn how "confraternities", such as The Black Axe (aka the Neo-Black Movement of Africa), the Seadogs (aka the National Association of Sea Lords), the Air Lords (aka the Supreme Eiye Confraternity), and the Vikings (aka De Norsemen Club) run the crime world of Africa. At the same time I've been building a network of interesting correspondents in Nigeria.

One enormous difference between Nigerian media and American media is that they need absolutely no facts to run a story. We frequently see a single malicious tweet quoted as an authoritative source and run in dozens of newspapers and magazine and hundreds of blogs and YouTube videos. So one form of communication I've had frequently is helping a few actually excellent investigative journalists in Nigeria sort out facts when it comes to the workings of the US Legal System. In this current case, two major BEC criminals, Raymon Abbas, who goes by Hushpuppi on social media, and Jacob Olalekan Ponle, who goes by Mr.Woodbery on social media, were arrested on June 10, 2020 in Dubai along with a dozen accomplices in six simultaneous raids by Dubai police that they later featured in an interesting video dubbed "Operation: Fox Hunt 2."

Afterwards, there was great speculation in Nigerian media - that they were already in prison in the United States - that they were already in prison in Nigeria - that they had been arrested by the EFCC (Nigeria's anti-corruption agency) - that they had already bribed their way out - that Interpol had released them - that Mr.Woodbery was sick with Covid-19 in a US prison ... on and on it went.

So, we waited until there was "open information" from the US courts, and then wrote up as many details as we could to help explain what had happened. The blog post steps through the likely charges based on the affidavits of probable cause, and the fact that Mr.Woodbery will be tried in Chicago, while Hushpuppi will be tried in Los Angeles. Then we go a bit beyond the court records by taking one of Mr.Woodbery's Bitcoin addresses and running it through CipherTrace, demonstrating that after one successful fleecing of a Chicago based business, he launders more than $3 million by selling it off through "LocalBitcoins.com." We also find that Hushpuppi was approached to help launder the funds from the Bank of Valletta 13 Million Euro robbery that is said to have been performed by "EmpireMonkey."

The further details are in my CyberCrime & Doing Time blog post, shared below.