United States Department of Justice has filed a civil complaint seeking to revoke the citizenship of Nigerian-born Emmanuel Oluwatosin Kazeem, convicted of orchestrating a large-scale identity theft and tax fraud scheme.
The department disclosed this in a statement published on its website on Monday.
According to the statement, the complaint was filed before the U.S. District Court in Baltimore, Maryland, accusing Kazeem of unlawfully obtaining American citizenship through fraud and concealment of criminal activities.
Kazeem was convicted in 2017 on 19 counts, including mail fraud, wire fraud, aggravated identity theft and conspiracy to commit fraud.
He was sentenced to 15 years imprisonment, although his sentence was commuted in 2024 by former U.S. President Joe Biden after serving about six years.
Assistant Attorney General, Brett Shumate, said the U.S. government would continue to pursue individuals who obtained citizenship fraudulently.
“The administration will not permit wrongdoers to retain U.S. citizenship they were never entitled to in the first place,” he said.
Court documents showed that Kazeem’s alleged fraudulent activities began before and continued after his naturalisation, which prosecutors argued made him legally ineligible for citizenship.
Authorities also alleged that he entered into a sham marriage to secure permanent residency before later marrying another woman, an action they said further disqualified him from naturalisation.
The investigation reportedly began in 2013 after a resident of Medford, Oregon, alerted the Internal Revenue Service that fraudulent federal and state tax returns had been filed using her family’s personal information.
Subsequent searches in Illinois, Maryland and Georgia allegedly uncovered prepaid debit cards, money orders, electronic devices and cash linked to fraudulent tax refunds.
Investigators later identified Kazeem as the alleged mastermind of the scheme.
The Justice Department said the syndicate possessed stolen personal data belonging to more than 259,000 victims.
It further alleged that Kazeem purchased over 91,000 stolen identities from a Vietnamese hacker who breached an Oregon company’s database.
Authorities said Kazeem and his associates used the stolen identities to file fraudulent tax returns between 2012 and 2015 and obtained thousands of electronic filing PINs to bypass Internal Revenue Service security protocols.
“In total, Kazeem was linked to 10,139 fraudulent federal tax returns attempting to obtain more than 91 million dollars in refunds and successfully received over 11.6 million dollars,” the department said.
Investigators also alleged that over 2,000 wire transfers valued at more than 2.1 million dollars were sent to Nigeria, with over 700 directly linked to Kazeem.
The department said he allegedly used proceeds from the fraud to make a nearly 200,000-dollar down payment on a house in the United States and attempted to fund a six million-dollar four-star hotel project in Lagos.
Authorities also alleged that Kazeem transferred ownership interests in some U.S. properties to his sister in Nigeria for 10 dollars shortly before his arrest in 2015.
The case was jointly investigated by the FBI, IRS-Criminal Investigation and the Department of Homeland Security.
The denaturalisation proceedings are expected to be handled by the Civil Division’s Office of Immigration Litigation.
