Instagram star Hushpuppi who helped launder $14m for North Korea and tried to rinse Premier League club's money jailed
8 November 2022, 14:38
An Instagram influencer who laundered millions of pounds stolen by North Korean hackers has been jailed for more than a decade.
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Ramon Abbas, 40, whose handle was Hushpuppi, admitted his involvement in cybertheft that caused $24m in losses (£21m).
Among the stolen money was millions taken from a British company and a Premier League club.
Abbas, who had millions of followers on the photo-sharing app, was linked to $14.7m (£12.9m) swiped by the North Korean hackers from a bank in Malta.
Prosecutors said the money was taken through banks in Romania and Bulgaria, which he provided the account information for.
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He also conspired to help launder millions stolen from a British company, which has not been identified, and a Premier League club.
He had joined up with convicted Canadian money launderer Ghaleb Alaumary and provided the 37-year-old with details for a bank account in Mexico he said could handle the money.
Abbas also set up a bogus website in which he played the role of bank officials to swindle a person in Qatar out of $1.1m.
Don Always, the FBI's assistant director at its Los Angeles office, said: "Ramon Abbas . . . targeted both American and international victims, becoming one of the most prolific money launderers in the world.
"Abbas leveraged his social media platforms... to gain notoriety and to brag about the immense wealth he acquired by conducting business email compromise scams, online bank heists and other cyber-enabled fraud that financially ruined scores of victims and provided assistance to the North Korean regime."
He was jailed for 11 years and told to pay $1.7m (£1.5m) to two of the fraud victims.
He told Judge Otis Wright he would pay back the victims with his own money but said he only made $300,000 from the scheme.
Abbas’s Instagram was packed with photos of him posing on private jets, with expensive luxury cars and holidaying in glamorous locations.
But his high flying lifestyle came crashing down when his Dubai home was raided at dawn by police in "Operation Fox Hunt 2".
He was sent to the US in 2020 to be charged.
