BASKING RIDGE, N.J. – On or about December 17, 2007, an individual purporting to be a member of Affinity FCU called the credit union about a home equity line of credit for which the member had an available balance of $810,000.
The member requested to draw down the line by $675,000 and have the funds wired to an account at the bank of Tokyo in the name of "Mosdaff Investments."
The individual making the request, however, was not the actual member, but a Nigerian immigrant named Abayomi Lawal, according to court documents and investigators. Lawal is one of 17 individuals, most of them immigrants, charged in a nationwide conspiracy that siphoned as much as $5 million in HELOC funds from U.S. credit unions and banks to foreign bank accounts.
When an Affinity representative, as part of credit union policy, called the member’s home to validate the request, an individual purporting to be the member confirmed the wire transfer request. So the credit union wired the $675,000 to an account at the Bank of Tokyo’s New York branch.
The whole thing took less than ten minutes, according to one of the investigators.
What the credit union representative didn’t know was that an individual purporting to be that member had called Verizon in the days before the transfer complaining about a malfunction on his home phone and requesting that all calls to the number be transferred to another number on a prepaid phone card until repairs were made. So when she thought the member was confirming the HELOC request, it as somebody else.
