A British-Nigerian citizen has pleaded guilty in a New York court, to bring involved in an over seven-year scheme to hack into banks’ and brokerages’ computer servers, resulting to over $6 million losses for customers.
The accused, Idris Dayo Mustapha, aged 33, had pleaded guilty to accessing device fraud, conspiring to commit computer intrusion, securities fraud, and wire fraud at a hearing before a U.S. District Judge Pamela Chen in Brooklyn.
Mustapha, who hails from Lagos State, Nigeria, had been arrested in the United Kingdom in August 2021, and was subsequently extradited to the United States in August of this year.
He faces at least 20 years in prison at his scheduled April 3, 2024 sentencing but it is more likely that he will receive much less time in jail.
Mustapha’s lawyer had not made any comment as at the time of filing this report.
Mustapha and his co-conspirators had reportedly used phishing and other dubious means to find out user names and passwords and access online accounts from January 2011 up till March 2018.
Prosecutors had revealed that the conspirators had transferred victims’ money and securities to their own accounts, and made unauthorized stock trades in hijacked accounts while concurrently making profitable trades in the same stocks in their own accounts.
