A 37-year-old Nigerian man was arrested yesterday in the Crumlin area of Dublin, Ireland in connection with a €6million international invoice redirect fraud.
He is being questioned alongside a 37-year-old Ghanaian woman who was arrested in the Santry area of Dublin’s northside.
They are being held at Pearse Street and Kevin Street Garda stations.
The arrests happened after detectives followed the money trail after two companies—one based in Dubai, the other in Hong Kong—were duped out of €55,000 due to separate invoice redirect frauds otherwise known as Alibaba or Business Email Compromise (BEC) schemes.
Officers from the GNECB established that the €55,000 had ended up in the bank account of a woman based in Dublin’s Monaghan county who is closely associated with the Nigerian arrested yesterday.
Further investigations showed that €33,000 of this money was used to make “high-end purchases” in the Grafton Street area of the capital between last St Stephen’s Day and December 31.
This included designer clothes, perfumes, alcohol, laptops, mobile phones, watches and other products.
Following a detailed surveillance operation and the analysis of CCTV in the city centre, detectives were able to identify the 37-year-old Nigerian and raid his Crumlin home yesterday where they recovered virtually all the goods.
“Gardaí are satisfied that he is high up on the food chain in terms of this organised criminal gang and what proves that reality is that he was freely able to spend the money that came from those two latest thefts,” a senior source pointed out.
“The fact he was using a bank card to buy all those products shows that he was no mere money mule for the organisation,” the source added.
While 10 arrests have now been made so far as part of Operation SKEIN, the GNECB have identified 90 suspects resident in Ireland and say €5m of the stolen €6m has been laundered through Irish bank accounts.
“The property seized is believed to have been purchased via the proceeds of Business Email Compromise (BEC) / Invoice Re-Direct Frauds which occurred in Asia during December 2020. The purchases were made in Dublin over the Christmas period in 2020,” a Garda spokesman said.
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