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To his 2.8 million Instagram followers, Ramon Abbas, known as “Billionaire Gucci Master” or by his tag @hushpuppi, is a man with the world at his feet: a speaker who benefits from the sudden wealth of the United Arab Emirates.
A self-styled fashion entrepreneur, she lives in a £1,000-a-night hotel with a fridge stocked with Cristal, designer clothes and luxury cars. He collected A-list friends from Premier League footballers to famous fashion designers, who delved into his social media feed.
But in June 2020 he was dragged out of bed in the middle of the night by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), where he was found to be a con artist who cooperated in fraud. email of institutions that have paid the last couple. of monogrammed Gucci rolls.
On Monday in Los Angeles Abbas, 40, was sentenced to 11 years and ordered to pay $1,732,841 (£1,516,182) in compensation after pleading guilty to charges including conspiracy to defraud phone, intent to engage in money laundering and identity theft. He will be extradited to Nigeria after his sentence.
He is “among the biggest moneylenders in the world,” said Kristi K. Johnson, Assistant Director of the FBI’s Los Angeles office. His “popularity and ability to network … has led to many revolutionary projects in the US and abroad,” Johnson said, adding that the FBI is keeping a secret ” about this global network.”
Business Email Breach (BEC) like Abbas is a simple but dangerous scam that starts when hackers access corporate email accounts. When a loan comes in, they capture it, often sticking it in the middle of a transaction by sending an updated one with their own financial information from an address that matches the original sender’s.
Abbas was arrested in 2020 in an attempt to flee the country. PHOTO: Dubai Police
To clean up the money he stole, Abbas helped arrange for bank accounts around the world to accept portions of the millions of dollars that had gone out without raising red flags. Successful frauds – 20,000 will cost the US more than $1.8 billion in 2020 – are “a serious global crime problem”, according to the FBI.
Before his arrest, Abbas’ frequent Instagram updates revealed that he grew up in Oworonshoki, Nigeria, the son of a Muslim taxi driver father and a Christian mother, a bread seller. A man who said he knew Abbas growing up described him as “cool”.
In an Instagram live chat before his arrest, Abbas talked about his days of looking for cheap designer labels in local stores, which he could sell to neighbors. for the product. His desire for more money and designer tools seemed to balloon over time. He moved to Kuala Lumpur – a hotspot for email scammers – in 2014, before acquiring @Hushpuppi, an Instagram handle he’s had for several years. In 2017 he moved to Dubai.
When photographer Ayaz Sheikh was hired in 2019 to shoot professional photos for the now-defunct @Hushpuppi Instagram feed, he told VICE World News he entered the Palazzo Hotel Versace Dubai to find “15 pairs of Balenciagas, unworn, 12 Louis Vuitton. Coats, unworn, and price tags [them]. Clothes are drugs. That’s what he really wanted.”
As long as the IG is doing well, the question remains – where does Abbas get all his money? When he met Ifedayo Olarinde, the Nigerian broadcaster, known as “Frozen Dad”, on the Dubai circuit, he invited him to his radio show, “he told we had a business that he ran, he invested in real estate,” Olarinde told VICE World News by phone from Lagos. “I didn’t think it was impossible” – continued Olarinde, although he added that he thought it was “a bit suspicious.”
In addition, he liked Abbas – funny, handsome, always respectful to the elder Olarinde, calling him “my uncle” or “my brother.” The photos she posted online looked impressive, but she was more serious in the flesh. “He’s full of life… he’s very busy. He is very happy and very busy.
Olarinde was at home when news of Abbas’ arrest in 2020 hit national television. Was he shocked? “Erm…” Omarinde went on. “I hoped to hope that he was right, so I was disappointed.” Abbas’s arrest seems to have gotten worse. Subtitled versions of the police tape broadcast in Arabic and English, action movie style, six simultaneous attacks of 12 suspects, recovery of $40 million in cash, 13 luxury cars $6.8 million, 47 smartphones, 21 computers – and the list goes on. of the two million names of the dead. Abbas pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit money laundering the following year.
Some 50 percent of BECs originate in Nigeria, according to Agari, an email security firm. Email scams began in the country in the 1980s when unemployment and poverty rose, and evolved from the earlier postal version, which involved asking for money for a good or service. will not come. Dubai is the next stop for sophisticated terrorists like Abbas, said Matthew Page, Nigeria’s expert on international affairs at Chatham House, where terrorists can “like They’re free, no questions asked.”
In Dubai, Abbas maintained a corporate image befitting the city’s one-percent club, sharing photos with designer Virgil Abloh, Chelsea footballer Tammy Abraham – who signed a shirt for his “big brother” – Manchester City’s Ben Mendy (now on trial. for rape) and big rappers from Wizkid to Davido, and many other famous people attended the beaches of Dubai. There were too many Nigerian expatriate wrestlers-turned-influencers with a taste for the high life, including Mompha, Olalekan ‘Woodbery’ Ponle and Sikiru ‘Pac’ Adekoya – all of whom were later arrested for money laundering (Ponle and Adekoya cases. have since been dismissed).
Abbas’ crimes include the intention to include him among the $300 million Prime Minister’s contract, a $14.7 million transaction from the Bank of Valletta in Malta, and a $1.1 million loan from someone who wants to pay the children’s school in Qatar, and about $1 million from a New York law firm.
The FBI, aided by the Canadian-American Ghaleb Alaumary, who was sentenced last year to 11 years in prison for money laundering, believes that he and Abbas, he found involved in the organization of big transactions, they are really pawns in the big picture – the explosion of crime and cybercrime that came out of North Korea, billions of dollars are being stolen. In February 2021, three members of his military intelligence agency were indicted in connection with the Valletta Bank cyberattack, which Abbas provided two European bank accounts to receive $10m in stolen funds. fraud. At the time, Assistant Attorney General John Demers of the Justice Department’s National Security Division said: “North Korean personnel, using keyboards instead of guns…
Ahead of the sentencing, Abbas’ lawyers pleaded for leniency, saying he was supporting three children born in Dubai, New York and London, whose parents are now in hiding in Nigeria because of the fallout. They said he “worked hard and made a way for himself” – although for Nigerian expert Page, there was less sympathy. Abbas “a little story about the Icarus … he looked for others, flew closer to the sun, and finally he burned.”
A year before his arrest, Abbas posted a photo of himself dressed in a green sweatshirt in front of a Mercedes Benz in the same shiny shade, with the words: “My story is full of broken parts, bad decisions and some bad truths. But it’s full of great comebacks. Looking down the barrel of 11 years behind bars, his labels gone and millions lost, that hope seems far-fetched.
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