Over the company’s transfer of $ 160 million to Nigeria, Fintech Chiefs will spend months in US jail
Anslem Oshionebo and Opeyemi Odeyale have been sentenced to 27 months in prison after Ping Express US LLC, their fintech company, facilitated the illegal transfer of $ 160 million to Nigeria. It reported Bloomberg on Friday.
Ping Express US LLC, a Texas payment company, failed to maintain effective anti-money laundering controls and unlicensed money transfers, according to U.S. legal records.
Oshionebo and Odeyale pleaded guilty to money laundering that resulted in the shipping of $ 160 million to Nigeria over about three years through their company.
READ ALSO: Nigerians extradited from Lagos to the United States over multi-million dollar fraud
The Dallas-based fintech company faces five years of probation and a fine of around $ 500,000 after pleading guilty to a similar charge.
Ping Express is said to have sent customers’ money transfers to African countries, including Nigeria and Kenya. The US Department of Justice (DoJ) highlighted a three-year period in which Ping Express failed to report a single suspicious transaction to regulators despite processing a “significant amount” of them. Ping Express then submitted a series of reports later.
DoJ revealed that a Ping Express customer used the company to move funds they earned from romance scams. Some of the victims of the scam were an Indiana woman who sent $ 15,000 to a fake oil worker in the Gulf of Mexico and another person who sent $ 6,300 to a suspected Irish sea captain.
In a separate case, another Ping Express customer moved more than $ 80,000 in a single month. The limit set by the company was to be $ 4,500.
READ ALSO: Nigerian brother-in-law faces trial in Cambodia over $ 400,000 fraud
Odeyale (43) and Oshionebo (45) claimed to be flawless. Odeyale sent an e-mail claiming that the case had “gross violations”.
“There’s a lot better I can do with the next two to three years than wasting it on fighting an insurmountable enemy,” Odeyale’s statement reads in part. “After going through a very painful three years of legal battle with a monstrous American DoJ, it was time to give in and move on.”
Oshionebo said they did not have the resources to continue pursuing the lawsuit. Bloomberg quoted Oshionebo as saying the story would be the best judge.
This is another economic crime related to Nigerians in the last week. Kenyan authorities froze $ 381,000 worth of accounts belonging to two Nigerian companies, Korapay Technologies Limited and Kandon Technologies Limited. These companies had allegedly illegally moved $ 51 million into Kenya.
Kenya’s Asset Recovery Agency (ARA) accused the companies of serving as a pipeline for international money laundering.
