Follow Us on Google
A United States federal court has sentenced a 32-year-old Nigerian, Olusegun Adejorin, to eight years in prison for his role in a business email compromise scheme that defrauded two charitable organisations of more than $7.5 million.
Adejorin was sentenced to 96 months behind bars by US District Judge Theodore Chuang, followed by three years of supervised release.
He was convicted of wire fraud, aggravated identity theft and unauthorised access to a protected computer to obtain information.
The US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) extradited Adejorin from Ghana to the United States in August 2024 to face prosecution over the scheme.
Following a six-day trial held in December 2025, a federal jury found him guilty on all the charges.
The sentence was announced by Kelly O. Hayes, US Attorney for the District of Maryland, alongside Jimmy Paul, Special Agent in Charge of the FBI Baltimore Field Office.
According to evidence presented in court, Adejorin carried out the fraud between June and August 2020, targeting two charitable organisations based in Maryland and New York.
Prosecutors said the Maryland organisation provided investment services to other organisations, while the New York-based charity ultimately lost more than $7.5 million through the fraudulent transactions.
Adejorin allegedly gained unauthorised access to employees’ email accounts and used the compromised accounts to impersonate staff and facilitate financial transfers.
Investigators said he also registered spoofed domain names resembling those belonging to employees of the New York charity.
Using the fake domains, he allegedly sent requests to the Maryland organisation seeking withdrawals of funds belonging to the New York charity.
Adejorin then allegedly accessed email accounts belonging to employees of the Maryland organisation and used them to send messages falsely confirming the withdrawal requests.
The fraudulent communications eventually led to more than $7.5 million being transferred from the Maryland organisation into bank accounts that were not linked to the intended recipient.
The US Attorney’s Office credited the FBI Baltimore Field Office with investigating the case and acknowledged the assistance of several Ghanaian agencies in locating and extraditing Adejorin.
Among the Ghanaian authorities involved were the Office of the Attorney General and Ministry of Justice, the Economic and Organised Crime Office, Ghana Immigration Service, Ghana Police Service–INTERPOL and the National Intelligence Bureau.
The FBI Legal Attaché in Accra also assisted with the investigation.
The US Department of Justice’s Office of International Affairs worked with the Ghanaian authorities to secure Adejorin’s extradition to the United States in 2024.
Assistant US Attorneys Joshua Rosenthal and Darren Gardner prosecuted the case.
The conviction highlights the use of compromised email accounts, impersonation and spoofed internet domains in business email compromise schemes, a form of fraud that can be used to divert large sums of money through seemingly legitimate financial instructions.
