SEATTLE — A former Nigerian government official was sentenced Monday to five years in prison for stealing more than $500,000 in U. S. pandemic relief benefits.
Abidemi Rufai was wearing a $10,000 watch and a $35,000 gold chain when he was arrested at New York’s JFK International Airport on his way to Nigeria in May 2021.
Rufai pleaded guilty in May in U. S. District Court. He is working in the U. S. in Tacoma, Washington, on charges of cordon fraud and nuisance identity theft, and Judge Benjamin Settle handed down the sentence Monday. The ruling also ordered Rufai to pay more than $600,000 in compensation.
Prosecutors said the 45-year-old had a history of fraud against the U. S. government. The U. S. Department of Homeland Security, adding stolen identities to apply for emergency relief after hurricanes in Texas and Florida.
“When the crisis came, so did Mr. Rufai,” Seattle U. S. Attorney Nick Brown said in a news release. in the United States. “
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Such fraud is endemic in pandemic relief programs, according to the U. S. Department of Labor’s inspector general. The U. S. Treasury said last week that $45. 6 billion may have been improperly paid to unemployment insurance from March 2020 to April 2022.
The Justice Department filed lawsuits against dozens of others in Minnesota last week as part of a fraudulent $250 million scheme that operated a federally funded child nutrition program during the pandemic.
Rufai, from Lekki, Nigeria, has a master’s degree and is politically involved in his home country, prosecutors said. He claimed to run a sports betting company since 2016, his finances were opaque and his main source of income was fraud. the U. S. government
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He was known as a prolific political fundraiser and in 2019 ran unsuccessfully for Nigeria’s National Assembly, U. S. deputy prosecutors wrote. U. S. Cindy Chang and Seth Wilkinson on a sentencing note.
Between April and October 2020, he used a stash of stolen identities — investigators uncovered more than 20,000 of them, with dates of birth and Social Security numbers in one of his email accounts — for pandemic-related benefits. She implemented employment agencies in at least nine states, including the Washington Department of Employment Security, on behalf of at least 224 Americans.