Nigerian Instagram celebrity, Ramon Olorunwa Abbas aka Ray Hushpuppi, has pleaded guilty after being arrested for engaging in cybercrime and money laundering charge.
Hushpuppi was accused of engaging in money laundering, of funds from business email compromise scams and other online heists.
After pleading guilty, he has now struck a plea bargain deal with the United States Attorney’s office for the Central District of California.
The document was signed July 4, 2021 by Hushpuppi, his lawyer Louis J. Shapiro and assistant U.S. attorney, Anil J. Antony.
His trial was initially scheduled for July 27 has now been postponed to a date to be determined later.
A Twitter post by Evan Ratliff, a journalist with Bloomberg first drew attention to the heavily redacted 29 page document, which also disclosed some of the uses Hushpuppi deployed the proceeds of crime.
In one instance, he bought a luxury Richard Mille wristwatch at a cost of $230,000.
In another, he wired $50,000 to an agent to procure St. Kitt and Nevis Citizenship.
The passport of the small country was delivered to Hushpuppi in Dubai last year February, just months before he was arrested by the Dubai Police and the FBI in June last year.
He was thereafter extradited to Chicago, along with another Nigerian alleged fraudster Olalekan Jacob Ponle, also known as Woodberry and 10 others.
Weeks after, he was transferred to California, where he has made a plea bargain.
In the plea bargain document Hushpuppi admitted to laundering money from the Malta Bank heist and the BEC attacks on a Premier League club, another UK firm, and an American law firm, as well as additional schemes.
As noted in the document the victims of Hushpuppi and his co-conspirators and the amount stolen were classified as:
*Foreign Financial Institutions $14,700,000
*UK companies: $7,740,000
*Qatari Victim: $809,983
*New York Law Firm : $922,857.
Hushpuppi’s plea agreement, which involved crimes allegedly perpetrated by North Korean state-sponsored hackers, was heavily redacted, and many of the filings in the case remain sealed.
Some of the highlights of the plea bargain are:
* Hushpuppi will restitute the sum of $1,732, 841 as minimum. It could be more, if the court decides.
*He has given up the right to appeal
* He agrees that his conviction makes it practically inevitable and a virtual certainty that he will be removed or deported from U.S.
