A United States federal court has sentenced Tochukwu Albert Nnebocha, a 44-year-old Nigerian national, to 97 months imprisonment for his involvement in a sophisticated transnational inheritance fraud scheme that defrauded over 400 elderly and vulnerable Americans of more than six million dollars.
The US Department of Justice announced the verdict on Feb. 6, describing the operation as a lucrative conspiracy spanning more than seven years, during which Nnebocha and his accomplices dispatched hundreds of thousands of personalised letters to US victims, impersonating representatives of a Spanish bank and promising multimillion-dollar inheritances from fictitious deceased relatives.
Victims were then manipulated into wiring funds for alleged delivery fees, taxes and processing costs to unlock their supposed windfalls, resulting in losses exceeding 6.8 million dollars that the court has now ordered Nnebocha to restitute alongside three years of supervised release.
Nnebocha’s arrest came in Poland in April 2025 following a coordinated international effort, leading to his extradition to the US in September 2025 where he pleaded guilty in November to conspiracy to commit mail fraud and wire fraud.
This marks the second conviction linked to the scheme, with eight co-conspirators from Nigeria, the United Kingdom, Spain and Portugal already convicted and sentenced, underscoring the global reach of the fraud network investigated by the US Postal Inspection Service, Homeland Security Investigations, the FBI’s Legal Attache in Poland, INTERPOL and Polish authorities.
Prosecutors from the DOJ’s Criminal Division Fraud Section, Senior Trial Attorney Phil Toomajian and Trial Attorney Joshua D. Rothman, highlighted the scheme’s exploitation of vulnerable elderly individuals, with the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Florida and the DOJ’s Office of International Affairs providing key support in bringing Nnebocha to justice.
The case reflects heightened US efforts against international fraud rings involving Nigerian nationals, coming amid similar convictions such as five others sentenced to nearly 160 years combined in Texas last June for a 17 million dollar scam targeting individuals, companies and governments worldwide.
