Nigerian man sentenced to six years in prison over $2m romance scam in Colorado

The US Attorney’s Office of Colorado has sentenced 37-year-old Adetomiwa Seun Akindele to nearly six years in prison for soliciting almost $2 million in cryptocurrency from a romance scam victim.

Akindele is a Nigerian national who has been living in Minnesota, authorities said. He will be deported back to his home country after serving his sentence.

“Romance scammers are relentless and cunning, preying on trust and emotion to exploit victims,” said FBI Denver Special Agent in Charge Mark Michalek.

Romance scams are a type of online scheme in which an individual falsifies their identity online to trick victims into sending them money.

The grifters often use cryptocurrencies due to their speed and global reach. Digital assets are also extremely difficult to retrieve, unless the victim acts quickly and notifies the relevant authorities.

A finance professor at the University of Texas at Austin, John Griffin, estimated that from 2020 to 2024, criminal networks moved more than $75 billion, the vast majority of which was derived from romance scams, to crypto exchanges.

“In the old days, it would be extremely difficult to move that much cash through the financial system,” Griffin said. “You’d have to go through banks and follow ‘know-your-customer’ procedures. Or you’d have to put cash in bags.”

‘Frank Labato’

Over the course of 10 months in 2018, Akindele posed as a wealthy Italian-American businessman named Frank Labato on an unnamed dating website, where he encountered a widowed woman from Colorado, according to the attorney’s office.

Using falsified information about his work and personal background, he convinced the woman to wire him $1.7 million via a cryptocurrency exchange.

Akindele then sent the funds to various other cryptocurrency exchanges before converting them to US dollars and depositing the funds into his bank accounts.

Liam Kelly is a DeFi Correspondent at DL News. Got a tip? Email at liam@dlnews.com.