On February 21, 2024, in the District of Maryland, Victor Ojo pled guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit bank fraud and one count of aggravated identity theft, as part of a business email compromise scheme.

Beginning in April 2016, Ojo and his coconspirators used the names of identity theft victims to obtain Employer Identification Numbers from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and state business certificates in the names of various shell businesses. Ojo and his coconspirators also compromised the email accounts of business and individual victims and used them to fraudulently solicit payments to bank accounts they had opened and controlled. Ojo and his coconspirators obtained legitimate checks written on the accounts of payor business victims and made payable to payee business victims. Ojo and his coconspirators would alter the names of the payee on some of the checks and deposit the checks into bank accounts they had opened and controlled.

In total, Ojo and the other coconspirators conducted more than $4 million in fraudulent bank transactions.

Source: The facts in this case narrative come from the following publicly available documents: D. Md. Indict. filed Aug. 30, 2022; D. Md. Plea Agr. filed Feb. 21, 2024; and Department of Justice press release dated Sept. 1, 2022