Two Nigerian men, Christian Nnadike, 34 and Collins Deke, 37 were each sentenced to 12 years in prison for hacking into the emails of local companies and assuming their identities to defraud their clients overseas.
They were found guilty together with a local female accomplice with the name Le Thi Kim Quyen 35. Her de facto husband, another Nigerian with the name of Mark Mamado Abdallah, 39 ran the scamming syndicate and is still at large.
According to prosecutors, the group defrauded many unsuspecting victims of over VND 3.3 billion (US$150,000) between April and August 2013. Most of this came from the email hacking scheme.
Prosecutors said over the four months, the vietnamese woman, Quyen and her Nigerian husband, Abdallah hacked into the emails of several Vietnamese companies doing business with foreign companies. They gave the information to Nnadikwe and then Deke, who would later transfer it to another Nigerian man living in Malaysia. The unknown man in Malaysia then used the compromised email accounts to contact the victims’ foreign partners, asking them to send payments to a bank account opened by Quyen and Abdallah.