Nigerian national Olamide Yusuf Bakare, 26, has been sentenced to four years and nine months in prison for conspiracy to commit wire fraud during the COVID-19 pandemic, U.S. Attorney Phillip A. Talbert announced.
According to a press release by the United States Attorney’s Office, Eastern District of California, on Tuesday, Bakare pleaded guilty in January 2023.
Court documents revealed between June 2020 and July 2021, Bakare, along with co-defendants Quazeem Owolabi Adeyinka and Ayodeji Jonathan Sangode, and others participated in a conspiracy to submit fraudulent unemployment insurance (UI), and Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) claims to the States of Maryland and California.
More than 200 individual applications were filed with the California Employment Development Department (EDD) and the Maryland Department of Labor (MDOL), indicating that the claimants’ address was the Hyattsville, Maryland, apartment the defendants shared.
During the conspiracy, the conspirators obtained the personally identifiable information (PII) of persons who were not eligible for UI or PUA benefits or who did not authorize the conspirators to act on their behalf to seek such benefits. Such PII included names, dates of birth, and Social Security numbers.
Bakare also possessed three additional UI debit cards, which had been issued by Maine’s Bureau of Unemployment Compensation, North Carolina’s Division of Employment Security, and Nevada’s Department of Employment Training and Rehabilitation.
Each debit card was linked to an account that contained UI benefits. Bakare was not the named beneficiary on the cards or for the associated benefits, and he possessed them with the intent to defraud the state agencies.
The debit cards that Bakare possessed and used during the conspiracy were linked to bank accounts that received at least $2,265,844 in fraudulent UI and PUA benefits.
He used this money, in part, to purchase a condo in Lekki, Lagos State, Nigeria, for 70 million naira. As part of the sentence, this asset was ordered forfeited.
Adeyinka pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud, and Sangode pleaded guilty to access device fraud. Both are scheduled to be sentenced by U.S. District Judge Dale A. Drozd on Aug. 22, 2023.
Adeyinka faces a maximum statutory penalty of 20 years, and Sangode faces a maximum statutory sentence of 15 years.
Their actual sentences, however, will be determined at the discretion of the Court after considering any applicable statutory factors and the Federal Sentencing Guidelines, which consider several variables.
