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Martins Inalegwu, 35, took a deal from the government, pleading guilty in U.S. District Court in Camden on Monday, March 25 to conducting an unlawful money-transmitting business and evading taxes for four straight years.
Inalegwu's wife, Steincy Mathieu, 27, had already pleaded guilty to tax evasion last November.
Oluwaseyi Fatolu, 56, of Springfield, followed her by admitting this past January that she laundered money for the couple.
Inalegwu and Mathieu, both formerly of Maple Shade, trolled online dating and social media sites for willing marks, whom they “wooed with words of love” on the phone and in emails, U.S. Attorney for New Jersey Philip R. Sellinger said.
Then they asked for money.
The victims, believing the imposters’ tales of financial woe, ended up sending dough for security deposits or application fees on apartments that the pretenders didn’t own, the U.S. attorney said.
They never heard from the con artists again, he said.
Inalegwu and Mathieu spent a chunk of the $4.5 million on themselves, an indictment returned in U.S. District Court in Camden says.
They also withdrew some of it in cash and transferred some of it either to other bank accounts that they personally controlled, it says.
The couple also used Fatolu's unlicensed money-transmitting business to wire fat stacks to confederates in Nigeria, federal investigators charged.
Fatolu operated a “hawala system,” directing Inalegwu and others to deposit money into her bank accounts and the accounts of her associates in the United States for a fee, Sellinger said.
The money they laundered then landed in bank accounts overseas, the U.S. attorney said.
This went on for four years, he said.
“These defendants took advantage of more than 100 vulnerable victims, preying on their loneliness to convince them to send money to scammers the victims believed were romantic partners,” Sellinger said.
Although most frauds cost victims all or part of their life savings, romance scams "take on an insidious level of harm," FBI Newark Special-Agent-in-Charge James E. Dennehy said.
"Few of us would want to admit we fell for this type of scam, but we’re all human and scammers prey on that fact," he said.
"The subjects are owning up to their crimes," Dennehy added, "but it may not provide much solace for the victims left broke and heartbroken.”
Sellinger credited special agents of the Atlantic City Resident Agency of the FBI’s Newark Division, special agents of the Department of Homeland Security’s Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) in Newark, special agents of IRS-Criminal Investigation, postal inspectors with the U.S. Postal Inspection Service in Newark and special agents from his own office with the investigation leading to the pleas, secured by Assistant U.S. Attorney Martha K. Nye of Sellinger’s Criminal Division in Trenton.
He didn't provide any sentencing dates.
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