Two former US Air Force members sentenced for BEC email scam

According to BleepingComputer, two former members of the United States Air Force have been sentenced to a combined 189 months in federal prison for running a multi-year business email compromise scheme. Chijioke Timothy Odimegwu, 25, and Harafat Mogaji, 26, carried out the fraud while stationed at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware.

The case shows what it takes to bring a BEC scheme to a courtroom: not just catching the two men who ran it, but tracing money through accounts in Chicago and abroad back to a wire sent by a victim in Iowa City and another sent by a victim in Ohio. That tracing is what turned a pair of stolen email logins into a prosecutable case.

What the men did

Odimegwu and Mogaji stole victims' employee email credentials through spamming and phishing campaigns. They then used spoofed email addresses that mimicked business partners, combined with the stolen credentials, to redirect payments to accounts controlled by accomplices in the United States and abroad. They also made unauthorized financial transactions using stolen account information, personal identification numbers, and credit and debit card numbers, some of it bought from other people in the conspiracy.

The Department of Justice said the pair fraudulently diverted a wire of more than $1.68 million sent by a victim in Iowa City, Iowa, to a bank account in Chicago controlled by the conspiracy. They also diverted a wire of more than $720,000 sent by a victim in Ohio. The department said these were in addition to many other attempts to divert wire transfers from businesses in Iowa and across the country.

The sentences

Odimegwu was sentenced to 111 months in prison and ordered to pay $366,617.59 in restitution. Mogaji was sentenced to 78 months and ordered to pay $995,680.45 in restitution. Both men will serve a three-year term of supervised release after completing their prison terms.

The sentences matter beyond these two cases because BEC remains one of the costliest forms of online fraud aimed at businesses. The FBI's 2025 Internet Crime Report logged 24,768 BEC complaints and more than $3 billion in losses for the year. A related case shows the same pattern operating at a larger scale: Ghanaian national Derrick Van Yeboah was sentenced in July to 85 months in prison after pleading guilty to his role as a high-ranking member of a fraud ring that stole over $100 million from victims across the United States through BEC attacks and romance scams.

For a business that has had a wire redirected after a routine-looking email asking to update banking details, this case is evidence that the money trail can be followed to the people who set it up, even when accomplices and accounts span multiple countries.