Celebrated CEO and founder of Invictus Group, Obiwanne Okeke has been arrested for Internet fraud in the United States.
The amount involved is said to be close to $11 million. This was disclosed in an affidavit made available to the press on Friday, August 15, by Marshall Ward, a special agent employed by the United States Department of Justice
It came as a shock to many Nigerians because he was celebrated as one of the youngest, greatest entrepreneurs to have come out of Africa and indeed Nigeria. In fact, in 2016 he was named by Forbes as one of ’30 Entrepreneurs Under 30 to Watch’
My jaws are on the ground after reading that DOJ Affidavit. Crazy. Social Media played a significant role in the investigations (Twitter, Instagram, Nairaland) – really intriguing stuff. Talk about an unwitting digital footprint. (First 4 pages of DOJ affidavit below) pic.twitter.com/O4I4jcoPND
— tolu ogunlesi (@toluogunlesi) August 16, 2019
Apparently Obiwanne was arrested after investigations from the FBI based on complaints from Unatrac, an international subsidiary of heavy equipment manufacturer Caterpillar. Unatrac complained that Mr Okeke gained unauthorised access to the e-mail account of its chief financial officer and authorised a series of fictitious invoices to the tune of $11 million.
The FBI also said that Mr Okeke had duped an American show manufacturer as part of a business email compromise (BEC) schemes that Mr Okeke and other accomplices had coordinated.
According to the charge sheet, “In June 2018, Unatrac Holding Limited, the export sales office for Caterpillar heavy industrial and farm equipment, headquartered in the United Kingdom, contacted the FBI.
“They reported that Unatrac had been victimised through an email compromise, which ultimately resulted in fraudulent wire transfers totalling nearly 11million US Dollars. After reviewing the documentation provided by the representatives, the FBI opened an investigation in July 2018.
“The FBI discovered that after capturing the legitimate credentials of Unatrac’s Chief Financial Officer, the accused was able to log in and access the CFO’s entire Office365 account, which included all of his emails and various digital files, the logs indicated that between April 6 and April 20, 2018, the intruder accessed the CFO’s account 464 times, mostly from Internet Protocol (IP) addresses from Nigeria.
“With full access to the account, the intruder sent fraudulent wire transfer requests from the CFO’s email account to members of Unatrac’s internal financial team. The intruder also attached fake invoices to the emails to enhance the credibility of the requests,” the investigator stated.
“Believing the wire transfer requests had come from their CFO, Unatrac finance staff processed approximately 15 fraudulent payments between April 11 and April 19, 2018. In some cases, several payments were sent to the same account.
“For example, the finance staff received and processed three invoices to Pak Fei Trade Limited: one for $278,270.66, one for $898, 451.17, and one for $1,957,100.00. In total, nearly $11,000,00 (Eleven million US dollars) was sent, all of which went to overseas accounts.
“By the time, the fraud was discovered, it was too late to cancel the transfers, and Unatrac was able to recover very little of the transferred funds.”
Obi has investments in real estate development, energy and construction. His company, Invictus Group, operates in Nigeria, South Africa, and Zambia.
