A 33-year-old Nigerian, Ugochukwu Anyakorah, has been sentenced to four years in prison for defrauding lonely individuals through online romance scams in Australia.
He was sentenced in March after pleading guilty to handling $890,000 in proceeds of crime.
Australian authorities arrested him following a raid on his North Rocks apartment in the Sydney suburb in mid-2023.
According to The Sydney Morning Herald on Friday, Anyakorah was also a member of the West African cultist group, the Buccaneers, which runs cyber scams in Australia.
His arrest came a year after the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation contacted Australian law enforcement in May 2022.
The report revealed that the 33-year-old, a mental health support worker, was freelancing as a “facilitator” for a large network of online fraudsters.
He was also part of a Nigerian “blood cult” targeting lonely Australians through romance scams.
“Messages sourced from Anyakorah’s devices showed he was in an encrypted chat with 52 other members, who were sharing 558 bank accounts from 28 countries, a court document seen by this masthead says,” the report stated.
Anyakorah and another man in Australia, whose name cannot be revealed for legal reasons, discussed 71 accounts, most of which were located in Australia.
