What I learnt from covering Hushpuppi’s trial in 28 months
“Do you know the Snapchat guy?” The Albanian Uber driver, who picked me up at the airport during my recent trip out of Nigeria, asked me when I told him I’m a Nigerian.
He asked the question barely 20 minutes into our exciting 90-minute conversation in his Tesla as we drove out of one of the world’s top 5 busiest airports.
“You mean Hushpuppi?” I asked.
“Yea, yea, that’s his name,” he nodded and smiled.
“I’ve been covering his trial in the last two years,” I told him.
Then I added that I’m a journalist and gave him a glimpse into my portfolio and what he didn’t know about Hushpuppi and how a majority of Nigerians detest his atrocities as his crimes do not represent who we are.
The look on his face did not suggest he was going to stereotype or profile me as another ‘Hushpuppi’ as many people in that part of the world do. In fact, he believes Nigeria and Albania share some similarities in corruption and poverty, so he had no reason to take to heart whatever negative news he may have heard about Nigeria.
“Police in Albania are very corrupt, all they know how to do is collect bribe,” he told me. Pointing at the traffic on the other side of the road, he went further, “if this was Albania, impatient drivers would have blocked everywhere while looking for an escape route out of the traffic.”
I smiled because that sounds like what we experience in Lagos where I come from.
As he dropped me at my destination in his Tesla which he told me he bought for over £40,000, marking the end of my first ride in a Tesla, I went back to thinking about how Ramon Olorunwa Abass, one of the world’s most infamous fraudsters, would probably have pre-ordered the next edition of Tesla – Model S or Model X, selling for over £115,000, then come on Instagram to flaunt the cars.
For 28 months, the Hushpuppi case was part of my core assignments. Now that a United States District Court for the Central District of California has sentenced him to 135 months in prison and ordered him to pay back $1,732,841 in restitution to two of his fraud victims, I’ve been taking time reflecting on what I saw, learned and, most of all, felt in two years of chronicling the story of Nigeria’s most infamous fraudster.
Hushpuppi himself cannot claim to have masterminded some of the damning heists credited to him. In fact, as I have come to understand in 28 months of covering his case, he was just a prolific money launderer for hackers engaged in ATM cash-out schemes, cyber-enabled bank heists, business email compromise (BEC) schemes, and other online fraud schemes. Using the Nigerian social media parlance, he was just a ‘picker’.
A picker in the cybercrime world is a person with the connection and contact to receive proceeds of frauds from any part of the world on behalf of fraudsters. A picker does not need to be involved in the process, the job of a picker is to provide a means to receive the proceeds and take some percentage from the loot. That was Hushpuppi’s job.
This is why Hushpuppi’s name appeared conspicuously in the charges indicting the North Korean military hackers and their Canandian-American co-conspirator, Ghaleb Alaumary, 37, who is said to be Hushpuppi’s ally. According to a statement by the U.S Department of Justice, “Alaumary conspired with Hushpuppi and others to launder funds from a North Korean-perpetrated cyber-enabled heist from a Maltese bank in February 2019.”
Hushpuppi provided the two bank accounts used to move funds from the Maltese bank.
In May 2019, Hushpuppi also provided details for a bank account in Mexico used to receive millions stolen from a football club in the United Kingdom as well as a British company.
After my first exposé on Hushpuppi published in July 2020, I learnt a startling lesson about how young Nigerians perceive fraudsters who claimed poverty pushed them into crime.
Many times, after doing an exclusive on Hushpuppi, some readers online who do not like to read negative reports about Ramon Abass Olorunwa would hurl insults at me on the internet. When fake news claiming he masterminded a new scam from prison went viral in March 2022, many hailed him as a legend. When I debunked the story with credible information from official sources, some online readers condemned me for not ‘writing about the politicians looting the country’.
Some called me a lazy journalist for daring to chronicle the story of their hero who portrayed himself as a symbol of hope and inspiration to many Nigerian youths. Millions of young people, desperate for inspiration and role models, looked up to him and drew (many still draw) inspiration from him because he represented their portrait of grass to grace story. They do not care about the lives destroyed by his atrocities.
“I am you and you are me. I represent every underprivileged kid of the world and especially of Nigeria and of Lagos and of Bariga and of Oworonsoki…Now, you see I represent you?” Hushpuppi wrote in his ‘Letter to the Ghetto Kid’ in May 2017.
Seeing a journalist constantly reporting his trial was too much to take in. But I found strength in their online insults because it helped me empathise with them. Many Nigerians do not really detest bad attitudes perpetrated by their faves, they only detest the act if the actor is not in their good books.
Covering Hushpuppi also took me to Oworonshoki which is partly a slum community in Lagos, where he claimed to have started his life. As a young journalist who also came from the trenches, there is a sense of hopelessness that oozes around such an environment. A feeling that anything good hardly comes from hardwork. It’s the kind of feeling that made the Biblical Nathaniel ask, “can anything good come out of Nazareth?” And I concluded that it would take discipline to grow up in such an environment without considering taking to crime. I’ve been there and I know what it means.
But Hushpuppi himself didn’t set out to be a celebrity fraudster. Before choosing the ignoble path, his dream was to own two motorcycles, a commercial bus and marry the daughter of a food vendor. He didn’t want too much. His dream, however, grew bigger when he started going to Lagos Island from his Oworonshoki residence in Lagos Mainland to sell used clothes. The luxury cars and mansions he saw on the Island changed his view about life. He wanted to live that life, so “I decided to do the things my forefathers never did,” he said.
One thing I’ve also come to understand about fraudsters is their unquenching thirst for fame and publicity. They want to be seen and known everywhere. It was evident with Invictus Obi and Hushpuppi.
Hushpuppi’s thirst for publicity, as I put it, was his way of promoting his ‘work’ to hackers across the world who became his clients and engaged his service as a ‘picker’. All those Instagram and Snapchat stunts were deliberate. It was his unique way of attracting ‘clients’ in North Korea, Canada, Kenya and other parts of the world.
Yes, I know that Hushpuppi’s sentencing will not rid the world of the many aspiring ‘Hushpuppies’ who throng his now-deactivated IG page daily to declare their admiration for him and his ‘hustle’. There are still many who are inspired by Abass and Invictus Obi’s story and want to enjoy the ‘good life’ they enjoyed before the arms of the law eventually caught up with them. The war against cyber fraud appears to have no end, but as authorities across borders collaborate to bring criminals to book, the noose will continue to tighten.
Young Nigerians in search of escape routes out of poverty will continue to embrace role models who mirror the kind of life they dream of. What are the options available to them: Hushpuppi and Woodberry? or Shola Akinlade and Ezra Olubi?
