U.S. Attorney Timothy Q. Purdon announced that on January 23, 2012, Adekunle Olufemi Adetiloye, a citizen of Nigeria and resident of Canada, was sentenced by U.S. District Chief Judge Ralph R. Erickson to 17 years and 10 months in federal prison for one of the largest and most complex credit card schemes in North Dakota banking history.
Adetiloye, 40, pleaded guilty on February 16, 2011, to participating in a scheme to defraud financial institutions and individuals out of money. Adetiloye was living in Toronto, Canada, from before January of 2005 to May of 2010, when he was extradited to the United States. During that time, Adetiloye funded a lavish lifestyle by conducting, with others, a massive fraud scheme accomplished by executing tens of thousands of fraudulent acts against individual people, financial institutions, commercial data providers, merchants, commercial mailbox companies, and state agencies.
Adetiloye’s scheme involved tens of thousands of acts of illegal conduct throughout the United States, as well as in Canada and England. Adetiloye and his co-conspirators fraudulently obtained the personal identification information from commercial data providers, such as LexisNexis and ChoicePoint, and with that information assumed the identities of those unsuspecting people to open credit card and other bank accounts at U.S. Bank and twenty other banks across the United States. Adetiloye used well over 100 different mail box addresses throughout the United States as well as approximately 100 different phone numbers with area codes representing all parts of the United States. Many of the 38,000 people whose identities were compromised filed statements with the Court detailing the awful disruption and chaos they experienced as a result of this fraud.
Along with the prison term, Adetiloye will be on supervised release for three years. A hearing regarding restitution and forfeiture has been scheduled for Feb. 15, 2012, in U.S. District Court in Fargo, at 9:00 a.m.
The case was investigated by the U.S. Postal Inspection Service. Assistant U.S. Attorney Nick Chase prosecuted the case.
Source: U.S. Attorney’s Office, North Dakota
Now THATS a statement. This needs to be on the front page of every paper in the USA. If it was, then people who do this sort of stuff, and the judges, prosecutors and lawyers can see what happens when some one messes with PII.
Some may counter that 17-20 years is a bit extreme of a punishment for a crime that did not involve lives. No one knows for sure how many lives were ruined because of the financial stress. If you take 38,000n people, times it by an average family of four, you have a boatload of people effected. Thats just the family. Add in the 3 credit cards per, and 100,000 business accounts are probably involved.
It used to be years ago, but North Dakota was the home to the most millionaires per square mile. I wonder if the schmuck planned to hit the more wealthy on purpose, or it was an US state that was close to the border. He probably thought he wouldn’t get caught since he lived across the border. Wrong.