A Kenyan national was on Tuesday fined Sh127 million ($957,000) to being part of a group that stole more than Sh480 million ($4 million) in romance and Covid-19 assistance scams.
In 2021, Florence Mwende Musau, 38, pleaded guilty in a Boston federal court in United States to conspiracy to commit wire and bank fraud.
Ms Musau and five other people used fake passports and numerous aliases to open bank accounts in and around Boston to collect and launder the proceeds of the romance scams.
According to court documents, Ms Musau is said to have participated in a series of online scams designed to defraud victims into sending money to bank accounts controlled by her and others.
To carry out the scams, Musau used fake passports in the names of numerous aliases to open bank accounts in and around Boston to collect and launder the proceeds of the romance scams.
She then executed large cash withdrawals from those accounts, often multiple times on a single day and generally structured in amounts less than $10,000, in an effort to evade detection and currency transaction reporting requirements.
During court proceedings, the prosecution mentioned that Musau played a minimal role and was acting on the instructions of her boyfriend, Nigerian national Mark Arome Okuo.
The accounts were also used to collect fraudulent pandemic unemployment benefits in the names of Massachusetts beneficiaries who did not apply for such funds, federal prosecutors said.
Musau, a graduate of the Technical University of Kenya (TUK), travelled to the US in 2018 on a tourist visa. She then acquired a work permit visa.
