A U.S. court on Tuesday sentenced Franklin Ikechukwu Nwadialu, chairman of Ogbaru Local Government Area in Anambra, to five years in prison for involvement in a coordinated romance scam in which he defrauded divorces and widows of $3.5 million.

The convict belongs to the All Progressives Grand Alliance, the party of Governor Charles Soludo, a former Central Bank of Nigeria’s governor.

Mr Nwadialu, elected LG chairman in 2024, was sentenced Tuesday at the U.S. District Court in Tacoma to five years in prison for his scheme to steal some $3.5 million from eight different victims via an online romance scam.

The Anambra council chairman was arrested at an airport in Texas in 2024. He was indicted in December 2023 for 14 counts of wire fraud connected to a romance fraud scheme, the U.S. Department of Justice said in a statement on Tuesday.

According to the DoJ, for over 15 years, Mr Nwadialu and his confederates manipulated older, often widowed or divorced, individuals with savings into believing they had serious romantic partners for their own financial benefit. One victim was in a “relationship” for three years with Mr Nwadialu’s fake online persona before learning the truth from the FBI.

At the sentencing hearing on Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Tiffany M. Cartwright called the crime “devastating”, noting that it is “not an exaggeration to say it ruined lives—not only financial lives” but also from the nonmonetary harms the victims endured, such as “shame, depression, and isolation from their own family”.

Mr Nwadialu defrauded victims of more than $3.5 million. He used various versions of the name ‘Giovanni’ when he met his victims online on dating websites such as Match, Zoosk, and Christian Café. Mr Nwadialu also used false images and information for his profile, typically telling victims that he was in the military and deployed overseas so he could not meet them in person.

“Using these personas, Nwadialu invented many reasons he needed the victims to send him money. In one case, he told a victim that he had been fined by the military for revealing his location to the victim and asked for the victim’s help paying the $150,000 fine,” the DoJ said.

It added, “Nwadialu used other manipulative ploys to convince victims to send him money. He targeted older, often widowed or divorced individuals. Another victim was a widow who thought she had found love again following her husband’s death.

“Instead, she lost her home and life savings and, even now, continues to suffer financially from the taxes, fees, and penalties she incurred from liquidating her accounts and home to help ‘Giovanni’. Try as they might, those victims may never truly recover from Nwadialo’s conduct.”