Nigerian man jailed eight years for $6 million inheritance scam in the US
A United States federal court has sentenced a Nigerian national, Tochukwu Albert Nnebocha, to 97 months (over eight years) in prison after he was convicted for his role in a transnational inheritance fraud scheme that defrauded more than 400 elderly and vulnerable Americans of over $6 million. The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) said Nnebocha, aged 44, and his co-conspirators operated the elaborate scam for more than seven years before he was arrested in Poland in April 2025 and extradited to the United States in September 2025. At his November 2025 guilty plea, Nnebocha admitted participating in a conspiracy to commit mail and wire fraud that involved sending hundreds of thousands of personalised letters to elderly victims across the U.S., falsely claiming they were entitled to multimillion-dollar inheritances from deceased relatives. Victims were told they first had to pay various fees, including proposed delivery charges and taxes, before receiving their purported inheritances. The forged scheme successfully extracted payments from hundreds of people, many of whom were elderly or vulnerable, resulting in total losses exceeding $6 million.
At sentencing, the court ordered Nnebocha to serve 97 months in federal prison, followed by three years of supervised release and restitution of more than $6.8 million to the defrauded victims. The DOJ noted that this prosecution is part of a wider international investigation into the fraud ring, with at least eight other co-conspirators from the United Kingdom, Spain, Portugal, and Nigeria having already been convicted and sentenced in related cases. The investigation involved collaboration between the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, Homeland Security Investigations, the FBI’s Legal Attache in Poland, INTERPOL, Polish authorities, and the DOJ’s Office of International Affairs.
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