Ramon Olorunwa Abbas, a 40-year-old Nigerian national was sentenced in the U.S. to 135 months in federal prison and has to pay $1.7m in restitution to two fraud victims. The social media influencer, also known by his Instagram handle Ray Hushpuppi, became known for a lavish lifestyle funded by transnational fraud and money laundering. He allegedly laundered $300 million and was arrested in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates in 2020.
Abbas accumulated immense wealth by conducting business email compromise (BEC) scams, online bank heists, and other cyber-enabled fraud that financially ruined scores of victims and provided assistance to the North Korean regime.
Abbas was “one of the most prolific money launderers in the world,” Don Alway, assistant director of the FBI’s Los Angeles office, said in the statement. “By his admission, the defendant laundered over $300 million in just 18 months,” the prosecution wrote in a sentencing memorandum.
Abbas conspired with Ghaleb Alaumary, 37, of Mississauga, Ontario, Canada, a convicted money launderer. Alaumary was charged separately and pleaded guilty in November 2020 to one count of conspiracy to engage in money laundering. He is serving a 140-month federal prison sentence and was ordered to pay more than $30 million in restitution.
In 2019, prosecutors said that Abbas helped launder about $14.7 million stolen by North Korean hackers from a bank in Malta and routed the money through banks in Romania and Bulgaria.
He also helped launder millions of pounds stolen from a British company and a professional soccer club in the United Kingdom, caused a New York-based law firm to transfer nearly $923,000 to a criminal account, and admitted in a plea agreement that he helped defraud someone in Qatar who was applying for a $15 million loan to build a school, prosecutors said.
In July 2021, a senior Nigerian police officer, Abba Kyari, was suspended by the country’s police commission after the FBI filed charges linking him to Abbas.
