A Nigerian national living in Minnesota has been sentenced to nearly six years in prison — and ordered to pay nearly $1.7 million in restitution — for defrauding a widowed Colorado woman through an elaborate cryptocurrency romance scam, federal authorities announced Tuesday.
The 37-year-old man, Adetomiwa Seun Akindele, will be deported to Nigeria once he serves his sentence, according to the United States Attorney’s Office for the District of Colorado.
Akindele pleaded guilty to one count of wire fraud and one count of money laundering in a scam in which authorities said he posed as a wealthy Italian-American businessman named Frank Labato on a dating website in 2018. Akindele and the woman began exchanging emails and phone calls during which Akindele “provided the victim with additional false details about his personal and work background, images, and photos, to substantiate his fictitious persona of ‘Frank.’”
Those conversations led to Akindele telling the woman she needed to open a cryptocurrency exchange account to help him out of a financial bind, authorities said. At his direction, she wired him nearly $1.7 million, which Akindele converted into various cryptocurrencies, laundered it across multiple crypto exchanges and then converted it back to U.S. dollars before depositing the money into his own bank accounts.
Akindele, according to federal authorities, fraudulently assured the woman he would repay her for what were characterized as loans to his business, even executing three fake “promissory notes” to reassure her she would be repaid.
“Romance scammers are relentless and cunning, preying on trust and emotion to exploit victims,” FBI Denver Special Agent in Charge Mark Michalek said in a statement. “This was an egregious case, and through relentless investigative work the perpetrator was tracked down and brought to justice.”
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