PEOPLES GAZETTE
The United States Secret Service has taken over the Binance account of 32-year-old male of Nigerian descent, Olamide Shanu, after tracing his account to a $2.5 million wire fraud, money laundering and sextortion scheme, court filings obtained by Peoples Gazette have revealed.
The allegations mounted against Mr Shanu and the manner the fraud scheme was perpetrated mirrored the operation of internet fraudsters in Nigeria known as Yahoo boys.
Scouting social media platforms such as Instagram and Snapchat for male teenagers and unsuspecting adults to defraud, Mr Shanu posed as a female to obtain the explicit images and videos of his victims after forming a deceptive intimate relationship with them. He then threatened to send the nudes to their friends should they refuse to send the requested sum and more sexual videos.
“Hello Fams this is [(CC-3)] naked pictures and dick he’s [(CC-3’s Username)] on Instagram,” the indictment sheet against Mr Shanu filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Idaho and stamped by clerk Stephen Kenyon on November 14 read.
“We, he tried to hurt me so I’m spreading his nudes rn to make him feel ashamed. All I want you guys to share this (sic) pictures all over the world till it goes viral and get to all his friends and family, that’s all,” reads a screenshot Mr Shanu sent to sextort a victim on April 3 while attaching the victim’s name, age and address.
Mr Shanu first got on the U.S. security radar after a victim’s mother in May lodged a complaint with the Boise Police Department in Idaho to report that her 16-year-old son was being sextorted.
The victim, identified as V1 to protect his identity as a minor, said that sometime in May, he accepted a friend request from @chloe.walterz on Snapchat. He developed an intimate friendship with his new acquaintance, whom he assumed to be a white female in her 20s, and they started exchanging nude photos and videos, which set in motion the sextortion scheme.
However, the relationship soon soured after @chloe.walterz threatened him to pay $300 or risk his nudes getting sent to his friends on social media. He said that he quickly complied.
Another $200 and $500 were sent totalling the payments to $1000. According to the victim, he explained his dilemma to his mother who promptly notified the authorities.
The teenager subsequently blocked an insatiable @chloe.walters whose demands for money had mushroomed. Shortly after he blocked the scammer, he accepted another friend request from one Camille_smith96 on the same platform.
Camille, his new friend, sent him a draft message of his nudes — which he previously shared with only Chloe — poised to be distributed to his friends on Snapchat, save the send button. Still V1 called the scammer’s bluff by immediately blocking the new user without succumbing to their demands.
By using warrants to obtain the Snapchat logs of both accounts, investigators were able to link their IP addresses to the same location in Lagos, Nigeria, indicating that Mr Shanu, whose digital footprints were found to have orchestrated the scam, was in fact the one controlling both accounts.
Further investigations revealed that the two accounts were hacked in February from their original owners who were minors as well to commit fraud, and that the original usernames and phone numbers were changed to Nigerian numbers.
Victim 2 or V2 was another underage victim forced to be a conduit for fraudulent transactions. He received payment from other victims into his Venmo account and forwarded them…
