President Donald Trump’s administration has initiated the denaturalisation process for Oluwatosin Kazeem, a Nigerian who used the stolen identities of thousands of U.S. citizens to pocket approximately $12 million in fraudulent tax refunds and channelled part of the proceeds into building a luxury hotel in Lagos valued at no less than $6 million.
Mr Kazeem was tried, convicted between 2015 and 2017 and subsequently sentenced to 15 years’ imprisonment in June 2018 by the U.S. district court in Baltimore, Maryland, until then-President Joe Biden commuted his sentence to six years in December 2024.
But Mr Trump’s administration reversed course in 2026, moving to revoke his citizenship, asserting that criminals of Mr Kazeem’s ilk must not be allowed to retain such “privileged” immigrant status.
Further complicating the Nigerian fraudster’s case was his “sham marriage” to two U.S. citizens solely to obtain permanent residency status, which alone was sufficient grounds for his denaturalisation.
“The Trump Administration will not permit wrongdoers to retain the U.S. citizenship that they were never entitled to in the first place,” assistant attorney general Brett A. Shumate of the justice department’s civil division. “U.S. Citizenship is a privilege, and we will continue to ask courts to revoke a status that was obtained through fraud and deceit.”
Mr Kazeem first got on the Internal Revenue Service radar in 2013 after a couple in Oregon complained that “false federal and Oregon state tax returns were filed electronically” using their personal identifying information, including social security numbers and dates of birth.
The couple’s testimony at the district court strengthened the government’s case against Mr Kazeem, contributing to his conviction on 19 counts.
The complaint triggered an IRS investigation, which revealed a pattern of fraud that identified Mr Kazeem as the mastermind who had begun training other persons, including his younger brother Oluwasegun Kazeem, on how to “use stolen PII to obtain thousands of electronic filing PINs to bypass IRS authentication procedures”.
An investigation showed that Mr Kazeem bought over 90,000 identities of U.S. citizens from a Vietnamese hacker who breached the database of an Oregon-based company that specialised in conducting background checks for thousands of clients for employment or other purposes.
Initially seeking to defraud the IRS of $91 million, Mr Kazeem used the stolen identities to file fraudulent tax returns and successfully received $11 million between 2012 and 2015. He wired millions of dollars to Nigeria, where he was building a luxury hotel in Lagos, deposited $200,000 for a new house in Maryland, and bought another apartment in Maryland for $175,000.
Kazeem also attempted to use his ill-gotten funds to develop a $6 million, four-star hotel in Lagos, Nigeria, the Justice Department said in a statement on Wednesday.
When Mr Kazeem suspected he was being hunted by the authorities, he quickly transferred the ownership of the townhouse to his sister living in Nigeria and added her to the deed of his Maryland residence.
He was arrested the following day and subsequently taken to court, where he was convicted of 19 counts of mail and wire fraud, aggravated identity theft and conspiracy to commit mail and wire fraud.
