The United States Department of Justice (DOJ) on Monday announced the extradition of a 43-year-old Nigerian, Tochuwku Nnebocha, from Poland to face charges of running an international fraud ring that swindled elderly Americans out of millions of dollars.
Nnebocha, arrested by Polish authorities in April 2025, made his first appearance before a federal court in Miami, Florida.
He has been in custody since his arrest, following an indictment filed in the Southern District of Florida.
According to court filings, Nnebocha and his accomplices orchestrated a five-year inheritance scam by sending personalised letters to elderly victims, claiming they were heirs to multimillion-dollar estates in Spain.
The letters instructed recipients to pay bogus delivery fees and taxes to access their supposed inheritance.
Victims who complied never received any funds. Instead, the payments were routed through a web of intermediaries, including former fraud victims in the US who were manipulated into forwarding the money.
The Nigerian national faces multiple charges, including conspiracy to commit mail and wire fraud, as well as substantive counts of mail and wire fraud. If convicted, he could receive up to 20 years in prison.
Two co-defendants, Okezie Bonaventure Ogbata and Ehis Lawrence Akhimie, were earlier extradited from Portugal and the United Kingdom respectively. Both have pleaded guilty and were sentenced to over eight years in prison.
The DOJ said the case is part of broader efforts to combat fraud schemes that disproportionately target seniors, including romance scams, fake lotteries, bogus tech support services, and “grandparent scams.”
Officials from the Justice Department’s Consumer Protection Branch, alongside the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Florida and international partners including INTERPOL and Polish authorities, collaborated on the case.
“This extradition underscores our commitment to holding perpetrators accountable, no matter where they operate, and to safeguarding seniors from fraudulent schemes that can devastate lives,” the DOJ said.