We watched and heard several movies and stories wherein, a con man used to trick and deceive people for his own benefit and greed. Billionaire Gucci Master Though most of the time, they are based on imaginary lines but somewhere they reflect the reality of the society and present world.
The above short discourse righty present, the case of a Nigerian Instagram influencer, who was recently ordered to spend his next 11 years in a U.S. prison for his accompany in a global theft and money laundering scam.
The Nigerian Instagram influencer who has followers more than 2.5 million and whose real name is Ramon Abbas, 40 years old, flaunted his luxury lifestyle, supercars, and private jets on social media as @hushpuppi and the Billionaire Gucci Master was sentenced in Los Angeles to 11 years in prison after pleading guilty in 2021 for engaging in money laundering of over $300 million.
Though he had duped many people and there are hundreds of victims but most important is a New York law firm that he tricked to wire $900,000 into a criminal account which is an unnamed British Football Club, and this money was thought to be used to fund a new school in Qatar by someone.
Abbas’s first crime starts with romance fraud, which involved adopting the identities of different people online and persuading lovers to transfer money, according to the BBC.
His frauds do not stop here, in 2019 he attempted to launder $13 million stolen by hackers of North Korea from Malta’s Bank of Valletta, which led to the shutting down of the payment system and bringing the European country into chaos.
Abbas was originally arrested at a residential property in Dubai in 2020, from where the officials had seized around $41 million and 13 luxury cars worth $6.8 million.
The influencers’ arrest and sentence of 11 years aptly represent an old English saying, ‘as you sow, so shall you reap’.
