Citibank Tries to Wire $27 Million to Nigerian Scammers

Last week, we covered a so-called Nigerian scam in which a group of thieves eschewed the standard approach of pretending to be your great-grandmother’s sister’s former roommate, and instead went directly after state coffers. Now there’s news that some would-be fraudsters are turning up their collective noses at the thought of robbing a mere state, and are instead going after entire countries. Given the severity of jail sentences and the dim view federal judges take of those who would steal the wealth of nations, the grand-scale carnival shysters are playing an extremely high-stakes game.

For a group of men currently accused of attempting to illegally steal Ethiopian assets, it’s a game they lost. According to The New York Times, the scam was masterminded and led by Paul Gabriel Amos, a native-born Nigerian then living in Singapore. Over time, Amos and his cohorts created a series of official-looking documents that instructed Citibank to wire the sum of $27 million from the National Bank of Ethiopia to a series of purportedly legitimate bank accounts. These accounts were actually controlled by the thieves, who presumably intended to empty them immediately once all 24 of the specified wire transactions had been completed. The exact amount of money intended for each account is not given, but I’m assuming the group settled on an amount of cash that, while sizable, could be moved from Point A to Point B without arousing too much suspicion.

Read the rest of this post