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Olukayode Ibrahim Lawal, a citizen of Nigeria last living in Smyrna, Georgia, was sentenced to 10 months in prison, time already served, after pleading guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud in December.
Lawal’s arrest was made as part of a larger investigation by the FBI’s cybercrime squad in New Haven and the IRS into “phishing” emails that were sent to several Connecticut school districts in 2017.
In March that year, an employee of the Groton Public School District received an email, apparently from another school employee requesting W-2 tax information for every employee in the district. The recipient of the initial email responded by sending W-2 information of approximately 1,300 public school employees.
Once the W-2 information was emailed, approximately 100 suspicious Forms 1040 were filed electronically with the IRS using the names and information of the phishing scheme. The 100 tax returns claimed refunds totaling $491,737. When three of the returns were processed, $25,543 of the fraudulently-obtained funds were transferred to various bank accounts electronically.
According to U.S. Attorney John Durham, Lawal controlled or used certain email accounts involved in this phishing scheme. A co-conspirator of Lawal sent personal identifying information, including names and Social Security Numbers, of at least 10 employees to an email account that Lawal used. Lawal then sent the victims’ personal identifying information to another co-conspirator.
The investigation into Lawal found that in February 2017, he attempted a similar scheme at Sacred Heart Academy in Hamden.
Durham said that Lawal entered the United States on a visitor’s visa in November 2016 and failed to leave in December that year, as scheduled. He’s been detained since his arrest in May last year.
Lawal, who is now in the custody of ICE, will be deported back to Nigeria now that his court proceedings concluded.
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