James Walsh reports:
Like dominos down the line from the first one tipped, federal investigators expect Wednesday’s guilty plea by a Fridley man to bring down an international counterfeit credit card scheme headquartered here in the Twin Cities.
Olayemi Lateef Banjoko pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit bank fraud, but he is just one of 10 defendants in a scheme that saw Twin Cities Nigerian immigrants allegedly pocket more than $650,000 over 10 months.
Banjoko, 26, of Fridley, admitted that from July 2008 through April 2009, he helped others pull off a scheme to defraud Capital One Bank. The scheme involved obtaining personal information — including Social Security numbers and mothers’ maiden names — about Capital One customers from an online source of stolen data in Ukraine. Banjoko and others then used the data to create counterfeit credit cards and obtain new personal identification numbers for those cards and accounts.
Read more in the Star Tribune.