A man on the FBI’s most-wanted list for cyber crimes has been indicted in a Washington-area fraud scheme that was detected when he tried to swindle $280,000 from a former senator’s chief of staff.
A 16-count indictment was filed against Tobechi Onwuhara in federal court in Alexandria, accusing him and co-conspirators of trying to steal a total of $38 million from banks through fraud, ultimately getting $13 million between May 2007 and August 2008.
A warrant has been issued for Onwuhara’s arrest, but he has been on the run since charges were first filed against him in August 2008. Since then, he’s been named one of the FBI’s most-wanted cyber criminals and his case was featured on “America’s Most Wanted.”
He was originally charged with bank fraud, but the indictment adds charges of continuing a financial crimes enterprise, aggravated identity theft, wire fraud, money laundering and other related offenses.
The scheme was unraveled when Robert Short, an Alexandria resident and former chief of staff for Sen. Strom Thurmond, discovered that $280,000 had gone missing from his U.S. Senate Federal Credit Union account, according to an affidavit.
Onwuhara had posed as Short and first transferred the money from Short’s home equity line of credit account to Short’s checking account, then transferred the funds to a conspirator’s bank account in Korea, the indictment says.
The indictment says the scheme operated by identifying people with home equity line of credit accounts, then obtaining personal information about those account holders. Onwuhara and others then fraudulently accessed their credit reports and would use the financial and personal information in the reports to pose as the victims when calling financial institutions and requesting fund transfers.
They also got copies of the victims’ signatures from public records, which they used as examples when forging signatures on documents, according to the indictment.
The scheme got First Technology Credit Union to transfer $187,220 from one victim’s home equity account to the victim’s savings account, then wire $94,000 of that to a conspirator-operated bank account, court records say. It also tricked the State Department Federal Credit Union in Alexandria into wiring $61,000 to an account controlled by Onwuhara and his team.
Five others have pleaded guilty or been convicted in connection with the scheme.
