version
Tobechi Onwuhara (right) at a Dallas
nightclub with Ezenwa Onyedebelu.
By Luke O'Brien, contributor
January 25, 2011: 5:29 AM ET
FORTUNE -- A luxury suite at the W Hotel in
Dallas is as good a place as any to conquer
the world. At least it seemed that way in
2007 when Tobechi Onwuhara got the crew
together. They'd meet there often, seven or
eight of them. Some had nicknames from the
Ian Fleming lexicon: C, Q, and E. Others
were called Mookie, Orji, Uche. They would
spread out on designer sofas and at the wet
bar, open three-ring binders, and fire up
laptops with hard-to-trace wireless cards. On
a nearby table there'd be prepaid
cellphones with area codes taped to them. A
phone for Southern California. A phone for
Northern Virginia. A phone for any place
Onwuhara had found the "good money."
In those days, the good money wasn't hard
to find. The housing boom had flooded the
country with capital. Lenders were making
promiscuous loans to unsophisticated
borrowers. It was an ideal environment for
Onwuhara, 27, a brilliant, pug-faced
visionary who favored True Religion jeans
and Ed Hardy shirts. Looking out over the
neon skyline of downtown Dallas, it was easy
for the crew to believe his assurances: He'd
make them rich. When the sun glinted off
one of his $100,000 diamond-encrusted
Audemars Piguet watches, who could doubt
it? Every few months he would buy a new
Maserati or Bentley. He owned expensive
properties in Miami, Dallas, and Phoenix. He
even had a secret love condo in the W,
where scantily clad women visited in such
numbers that one bellhop became
convinced that the first-generation Nigerian-
American was a porn director.
The truth was very different. In his
ancestral homeland, Onwuhara might have
been a chief. In America he became one of
the world's most successful cyberscammers,
a criminal genius who used his talents to filet
a poorly regulated banking and credit
system. In less than three years Onwuhara
stole a confirmed $44 million, according to
the FBI, which believes the total may be
anywhere from $80 million to $100 million.
All he needed was an Internet connection
and a cellphone.
Onwuhara called it "washing." He'd set up a
boiler room in a fancy hotel (the Waldorf-
Astoria was another favorite) to wash
information on wealthy victims. Then he'd
wash bank accounts. One group in his crew
would do online research using databases
and websites to harvest names, dates of
birth, and mortgage information. They'd
build profiles of victims for a second group,
who would call banks posing as account
holders. The callers cadged security
information and passwords. Then Onwuhara
would breach the accounts and wire funds
from them to a network of money mules he
had established in Asia. The money would
be laundered and wired back to his
accounts in the U.S.
"I call it modern-day bank robbery," says FBI
special agent Michael Nail. "You can sit at
home in your PJs and slippers with a laptop,
and you can actually rob a bank."
Onwuhara specialized in hitting home equity
lines of credit (HELOCs), the reservoirs of
cash that banks make available to
homeowners. Once Onwuhara gained access
to a HELOC, he could siphon out vast sums in
seconds. His weapon was persuasion. It got
him enough money to start building a
colonnaded fortress in Nigeria; enough to
gamble at the high-stakes tables in Vegas
casinos all night. Even his accomplices
appear not to have known how much he
was really pulling down -- not even his
beautiful fiancée, Precious Matthews.
"He was playing all of us," says Paula Gipson,
a member of the crew. "The banks, us,
Precious, everybody."
Conversations with Gipson and other
Onwuhara associates, interviews with his
family and with investigators, and hundreds
of pages of court documents reveal a digital
scavenger of extraordinary creativity and
guile. Onwuhara orchestrated his swindles
using information about homeowners that is
widely available online. In fragments, this
information is innocuous. When assembled
properly, it can be used like an electronic
skeleton key to get into almost any credit
account. Onwuhara needed only a few short
years to rack up an illicit fortune. And he's
still at large.
Culled from sahara reporters, cnn and talkofnaija
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