Ramon Abbas, nicknamed Hushpupi, was found guilty of laundering earnings from a school finance scam, business email hack, and other fraudulent cyber operations, and the United States District Court for the Central District of California sentenced him to 11 years and three months in prison on Monday.
The Instagram celebrity was also ordered by a federal judge to pay $1.7m in restitution to two fraud victims, the US Department of Justice said in a statement on Tuesday.
Justice Otis Wright II’s ruling brought an end to Hushpuppi’s trial, which had been ongoing since his arrest in June 2020 at a hotel flat in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.
Don Alway, the assistant director in charge of the FBI’s Los Angeles Office, https://sureloaded.net referred to Hushpuppi as “one of the most prolific money launderers in the world” in the statement.
On July 3, Hushpuppi was returned to the USA.
He was taken into custody for scamming more than 1.9 million individuals, the majority of them were Americans.
He also admitted guilt to the allegations brought against him.
Regina Manneh, Hushpuppi’s wife, and two Imams reportedly wrote to the US district court separately from Lagos and Borno states pleading for forgiveness, according to an online news source called Premium Times.
According to the platform, Hushpuppi was referred to in the letter as “a frequent donor” to the mosque by Rasaq Olopede, the imam of Lagos’ Imisi-Oluwa Mosque.
In another letter, Hushpuppi received praise from Hudu Abdulrasak of Madrasatul Ahlul-Bait Islamiya in Maiduguri, Borno State, for his charitable deeds for widows and orphans.
On November 4, letters were submitted to the US District Court in support of the convicted person’s prior request for a lenient punishment.
Hushpuppi was still being held at the Metropolitan Detention Center, from where he would be transferred to a federal jail, according to information obtained by our correspondent.
He likely hasn’t been transferred to a jail yet, according to Thom Mrozek, the United States Attorney’s Office’s director of media relations, in response to an email from our correspondent on Tuesday. He will serve his punishment in one of the country’s federal prisons. The U.S. Bureau of Prisons, which oversees such facilities and has the only ability to decide where a prisoner would be imprisoned, will choose the exact facility.
Abdul Mahmud, a rights attorney, claimed Abbas deserved a life sentence.
The conviction of Abass, he claimed, “illustrates how other countries view the problem of cybercrime as a national security concern, which questions the economic interests of the state.
“I wished he had received a life sentence. We don’t frequently think about how victims of cybercrime lose the value of their lives financially.
Festus Ogun, another attorney, said that the punishment was appropriate for the crime and that the nation’s justice system may benefit from it.
