By Two Nigerian executives at a Texas-based remittance company have bagged jail sentences for breaching US anti-money laundering rules.
The company, Ping Express, pleaded guilty to money laundering after sending over $160 million to Nigeria in suspicious transactions over a period of three years.
According to a statement by the US Department of Justice (DOJ), the fintech company admitted it failed to seek sufficient details about the sources or purposes of the funds involved in the transactions or the customers initiating the transmissions.
The firm’s Chief Executive Officer (CEO), Anslem Oshionebo, and the Chief Operating Officer (COO), Opeyemi Odeyale, were both handed a 27-month prison sentence for their involvement, according to US legal filings.
The company’s business manager, Aleoghena Okhumale, however, received a 42-month prison sentence for intentionally transferring criminal proceeds.
According to the DOJ statement, three individuals – including two of Ping Express’s top customers – previously pleaded guilty to transmitting illegally-derived funds through the company.
One of the customers, Collins Orogun had admitted that he accepted a fee in exchange for transferring money for “romance scam” fraudsters and other criminals.
“In one instance, an Indiana woman sent $15,000 to ‘Carson Jacks’, a purported oil roughneck in the Gulf of Mexico she fell in love with online, after he told her he’d contracted malaria. In another, a second Indiana woman sent $6,300 to ‘Thomas Ken,” a purported Irish ship captain she fell in love with online, to fix his ship,” the statement said.
The DOJ said in two years, Orogun received more than $1.3 million in cash, cashier’s checks, and wires into several US bank accounts he controlled and then quickly moved more than $1 million of the funds to Africa through Ping Express. He now faces up to 20 years in federal prison and is set to be sentenced on Jan. 23, 2023
Ping Express had earlier admitted it failed to seek sufficient details about the sources or purposes of the funds it helped to transmit, or the customers initiating the transmissions.
By law, the company was supposed to report any suspicious transactions to regulators. But according to the company’s court filings, it failed to make a single anti-money laundering report in 3 years of operation.
Ping Express now faces five years of probation and a fine of up to $500,000.
