Nigerian man arrested on Covid-unemployment fraud charges after he decides to visit America

A Nigerian man indicted in Boston in 2020 for his role in a pandemic-unemployment scam ring that allegedly netted some $1.5 million was arrested at New York's JFK Airport, where he had just landed on a flight from Lagos on what would have been his first visit to the US, court records show.

Yomi Jones Olayeye, 40, of Lagos, faces one count of wire fraud conspiracy, one count of wire fraud and one count of aggravated identity theft, according to the US Attorney's office in Boston. The 2020 indictment that named him, issued on Sept. 1, 2020 but only unsealed last week, still has the names of his four alleged accomplices redacted because, unlike him, they have not shown any interest in coming to America.

According to the indictment, the ring used Bitcoin to buy ID information for Americans on "criminal Internet forums" and then used that to apply for pandemic unemployment benefit in several states, from Massachusetts to Hawaii, between March and August, 2020. The indictment alleges that residents of Ashland, Medway and Bourne were among the people whose IDs were used.

Ring members also took advantage of a fluke in the way Google Mail works, the indictment continues: They were able to use variations of a single Google Mail ID, which unemployment agencies saw as different e-mail addresses, but which Google funneled into a single inbox, letting them more easily manage all of their unemployment correspondence.

In all, the ring applied for roughly $10 million in benefits and made off with $1.5 million, the indictment alleges.

The ring hired people in the US with American bank accounts to which the ring had unemployment agencies direct the money - after which these "clients" would then transfer the money to Nigeria, the indictment alleges, adding that ring members leased space on a server in the US to submit their online unemployment applications in an attempt to hide the fact they were actually in Nigeria.

After his arrest at Kennedy, Olayeye appeared before a judge in Brooklyn federal court, who ordered his case transferred to Boston and him transferred to a federal lockup in Rhode Island.

He is scheduled for a detention hearing in Boston federal court on Monday. In Brooklyn, prosecutors had asked he be detained until the outcome of his case as a flight risk, in part because he has no connections to either New York or the Boston area and because if convicted he faces a minimum mandatory sentence of two years, with the possibility of up to 11 additional years in prison.

Innocent, etc.

Complete indictment (3.9M PDF).
Request for pre-trial detention (200k PDF).