Nigerian influencer imprisoned for cyber fraud involvement

The U.S. Department of Justice has announced that Instagram influencer Ramon Olorunwa Abbas, also known as Hushpuppi, has been given an 11-year prison sentence for his involvement in laundering millions of dollars stolen from different cyber scams, including business email compromise attacks, BleepingComputer reports. Abbas has been noted by the Justice Department to have conspired to launder more than $300 million from 2019 to 2022. The Justice Department said that Abbas helped North Korean hackers transfer $14.7 million stolen from a bank in Malta to Bulgarian and Romanian accounts in January 2019. Millions of pounds stolen from a U.K.-based professional soccer club was then laundered by Abbas to Mexican bank accounts in May 2019 before luring a New York-based law firm to send more than $900,000 to a co-conspirator's account in October 2019. Aside from the prison sentence, Abbas has also been ordered to provide more than $1.7 million in restitution to the law firm and a business person in Qatar, who was victimized by his fake multi-million loan scheme.