New York — In New York, a British man was accused of hacking an email server or computer belonging to a U.S. bank or brokerage firm to steal money from an investor’s account and cost more than $ 5 million. ..
According to 10 complaints released on Tuesday, Idris Dayo Mustapha, 32, and others used phishing and other means to obtain usernames and passwords online from January 2011 to March 2018. You have accessed your bank and brokerage accounts.
Prosecutors said Lagos from Nigeria and his conspirators first sent the victim’s money to his account.
They said that when banks began to block remittances, conspirators would trade unauthorized stocks in hacked accounts, while at the same time making profitable trades in the same stocks in their accounts.
A complaint was quoted in April 2016 between Mustafa and an unnamed conspirator, a Lithuanian national, about whether to make a fraudulent trade-in or remittance from a brokerage firm’s account.
“It’s better to trade up and down, not the wire of direct fraud,” Mustafa said.
In the statement. Breon Peace, a U.S. lawyer in Brooklyn, said Mustafa was “part of a vicious group that cost millions of dollars to victims by engaging in a series of cybercrime.”
A New York-based Mustafa lawyer did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The United States is about to hand over Mustafa after being arrested in the United Kingdom in August 2021.
If convicted, Mustafa faces up to 20 years in prison for various wire fraud, securities fraud, and money laundering charges, as well as an additional two years of personal information theft.
In 2016, the US Securities and Exchange Commission won an asset freeze against Mustafa in a Manhattan civil lawsuit.
The case is US vs. Mustafa, US District Court, East New York District, No.17-mj-00367.
Jonathan Stempel
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