Olamide Shanu, a Lagos Yahoo Boy, has pleaded guilty in the District of Idaho to charges related to cyber-fraud schemes that defrauded 150 American victims of more than $2,500,000.
Mr Shanu, 35, who was extradited to the U.S. in 2025 over involvement in money laundering, wire and romance scams, now risks a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison, and his sentence is scheduled for December 15, 2026.
Citing court documents, the U.S. Department of Justice, in a statement on Tuesday, said Mr Shanu and his co-conspirators participated in an international, financially motivated sextortion, romance fraud, and money laundering scheme.
“As part of the sextortion scheme, Shanu and his co-conspirators typically targeted male victims, persuaded them to send sexual images of themselves, and then threatened to send the victim’s sexual images to the victim’s friends and family unless the victim made payments to the co-conspirators,” the DoJ said.
Mr Shanu and his co-conspirators engaged in the extortion of numerous victims across the United States, including an individual located in Idaho. In the romance scams, Shanu and his co-conspirators, using fake identities on social media, made contact with victims—typically older women and men—and established deceptive emotional relationships.
According to Mr Shanu’s indictment, he and his conspirators disguised themselves as females on social media and persuaded their victims, typically males, to send sexual images of themselves. Once the victims sent the explicit images, he threatened to send them to the victims’ friends and families unless the victims paid money.
Mr Shanu allegedly obtained at least $2,000,000 fraudulently from his victims, laundering it through peer-to-peer payment applications and several cryptocurrency wallet addresses before transferring it to the scheme’s perpetrators in Nigeria.
The U.S. Secret Service took over Mr Shanu’s Binance account after tracing a $2.5 million wire fraud, money laundering, and sextortion scheme to his account.
