Arrested in Dubai: Instagram influencer 'Hushpuppi' gets 11-year jail term for money laundering

On Monday, a Nigerian social media influencer who called himself Ray Hushpuppi, and flaunted a lavish lifestyle fuelled by his efforts to launder millions of stolen dollars, was sentenced in Los Angeles to more than 11 years in federal prison.

Ramon Abbas, 40, was also ordered by a federal judge to pay $1.7 million in restitution to two fraud victims, according to a statement from the US Department of Justice.

Abbas was “one of the most prolific money launderers in the world", Don Alway, assistant director in charge of the FBI's Los Angeles office, said in the statement.

Prosecutors said Abbas and a Canadian man laundered money from various online crimes including bank cyber heists and business email compromise (BEC), a prolific crime in which crooks hack into email accounts, pretend to be someone they’re not, and fool victims into wiring money where it doesn’t belong.

In 2019, he helped launder about $14.7 million stolen by North Korean hackers from a bank in Malta, funnelling the money through banks in Romania and Bulgaria, prosecutors said.

He also helped launder millions of pounds stolen from a British company and a professional soccer club in the United Kingdom, got a New York-based law firm to transfer nearly $923,000 to a criminal account and acknowledged in a plea agreement that he helped defraud someone in Qatar who sought a $15 million loan to build a school, federal prosecutors said.

At Monday's sentencing, Abbas was sentenced to 135 months in federal prison and was ordered to pay $922,857 in restitution to the law firm and $809,983 in restitution to the victim in Qatar.

“By his own admission, during just an 18-month period defendant conspired to launder over $300 million,” prosecutors wrote in a sentencing memorandum, although they said much of the intended loss “did not ultimately materialise".

Abbas, under the name 'Ray Hushpuppi', had more than 2 million Instagram followers before he was arrested in 2020 in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates.

His social media posts showed him living a life of luxury, replete with private jets, ultra-expensive cars and high-end clothes and watches.