Romance and inheritance scams paid for Georgia man’s down payment on a boat, feds say
A woman in Kansas and a man from California unknowingly helped pay for a boat for an accused scammer when they wired hundreds of thousands of dollars to accounts he controlled in 2018, prosecutors said.
Now the man behind the alleged fraud is facing federal charges.
Emmanuel Ugbaja, 53, was charged with money laundering in an indictment unsealed on Wednesday, Nov. 17, in the Eastern District of Louisiana. Ugbaja is from Duluth, Georgia, just outside of Atlanta, and is accused of operating so-called “drop accounts” where the proceeds of various online scams were deposited.
Herbert V. Larson, Jr., Ugbaja’s defense attorney, declined to comment on the allegations in a statement to McClatchy News on Friday, Nov. 19.
“We have entered a plea of not guilty to the charges, and look forward to presenting our side of the matter in court, at trial,” Larson said. “Beyond that it would be improper for me to comment.”
According to the indictment, Ugbaja is a citizen of Nigeria who lives in Georgia, where his company DECT Investment LLC is registered to do business.
In September 2018, prosecutors said, a Kansas woman met a man on eHarmony who said his name was Richard Josh Kanhai. Kanhai claimed to be an architectural engineer who’d just won a major contract in Spain and was in need of $600,000 for equipment.
In reality, the government said, Kanhai was a fake name for an alleged co-conspirator of Ugbaja.
Kanhai sent the woman a picture of a check for $4.2 million and said it wouldn’t clear for three weeks. According to the indictment, she then agreed to give him $100,000 — $55,000 of which was sent in the form of a cashier’s check to DECT Investment, Ugbaja’s business in Georgia.
Shortly after the funds cleared, Ugbaja wired $40,000 from his account to a broker called Bourg Marine to put toward the down payment on a boat, prosecutors said.
According to its website, Bourg Marine is a “third generation family owned maritime broker and consultant” located in Kenner, Louisiana, just outside of New Orleans.
Around the same time as the romance scam, a California man was contacted by someone going by the name Tom Mallard who claimed to be an attorney in the U.K., prosecutors said. Mallard reportedly told the man he stood to inherent $10.5 million from a resident in the U.K. who shared the same last name.
In reality, Mallard was another one of Ugbaja’s alleged co-conspirators.
The man, who prosecutors identified only as “Victim 2,” was reportedly told he needed to pay taxes and fees on said inheritance.
“Victim 2 and ‘Mallard’ spoke almost daily by telephone for approximately one month,” the indictment states. “Victim 2 believed he was paying fees related to his inheritance and continued to send wire transfers to numerous entities as instructed by ‘Mallard.’”
One of those transfers was for a sum of $43,000 that went to the DECT Investment account, prosecutors said.
Four days after the transfer went through, Ugbaja is accused of wiring another $20,000 to Bourg Marine for the boat. The government said the second victim ultimately sent at least $800,000 to various bogus accounts between October and November 2018 as part of the scam.
Ugbaja was arraigned before a judge in the Eastern District of Louisiana on Oct. 29, court filings show.
He was granted a $10,000 bond and released on certain conditions, including that he refrain from contacting any victims or witnesses in his case and deactivate all of his dating and social media accounts.
This story was originally published November 19, 2021 at 1:28 PM with the headline "Romance and inheritance scams paid for Georgia man’s down payment on a boat, feds say."
