The U.S. has sentenced 34-year-old Ghanaian lady Deborah Mensah to 70 months in jail for her involvement in a fraudulent enterprise that used compromised email accounts to steal millions of dollars from businesses and vulnerable individuals searching for love. 

In a statement made available to Peoples Gazette on Thursday, the U.S. Department of Justice disclosed that Ms Mensah was extradited from Ghana to the U.S. last August.

Evidence presented in court detailed that Ms Mensah and her co-conspirators received over $10 million in fraud proceeds from victims of the enterprise into bank accounts that she and other members of the Enterprise controlled in the Bronx, New York.  

Ms Mensah was a member of a Ghanaian criminal enterprise that committed a series of business, email and romance scams against individuals and businesses located across the United States between 2014 and 2018.

The enterprise also created fake profiles on online dating services to entice people looking for companionship into fraudulent relationships. 

The Justice Department detailed that members of the fraudulent enterprise created email accounts with slight variations of email accounts used by employees of a victim company or third parties engaged in business with a company to “spoof” or impersonate those employees or third parties.  

The fake email accounts were specifically designed to trick other employees of the company with access to the company’s finances into thinking the fake email accounts were authentic. 

The enterprise also used electronic messages sent via email, text messaging, or online dating websites to mislead victims who mostly were vulnerable older men and women into believing the victim were in a romantic relationship with a fake identity assumed by members of the enterprise.  

The Justice Department  further detailed that Ms Mensah opened and maintained multiple business bank accounts in the name of an auto sales company to receive funds stolen from victims and launder them to co-conspirators based primarily in Ghana.  

Ms Mensah was sentenced on Thursday after pleading guilty to conspiring to commit money laundering on April 2, 2021. 

The court also directed the Ghanaian to forfeit $202,964 and pay restitution of $1.5 million to victims. 

Ms Mensah was also sentenced  to three years of supervised release.