A Nigerian man, Tochukwu Albert Nnebocha, has been sentenced to over eight years in a US prison for his role in a $6 million inheritance scam that defrauded 400 Americans.
Nnebocha, 44, was sentenced five months after being extradited from Poland to face federal charges in the United States for participating in a transnational criminal organisation that ran a large-scale inheritance fraud scheme. He was initially arrested by Polish authorities in April 2025 following an indictment filed by the US Attorney’s Office, Southern District of Florida, and was extradited to the US in September 2025, where he made his first court appearance.
Court documents revealed that Nnebocha and his co-conspirators operated the scheme for more than seven years, targeting vulnerable and elderly Americans. They sent hundreds of thousands of personalised letters claiming to be representatives of a Spanish bank, falsely informing recipients that they were entitled to multimillion-dollar inheritances left by deceased relatives. The scam ultimately defrauded approximately 400 individuals of $6 million.