A U.S. court has sentenced Matthew A. Akande, a Nigerian national based in Mexico, to eight years’ imprisonment for defrauding the U.S. government of $1.3 million.

The 37-year-old crook swindled the U.S. government out of $1.3 million by using taxpayers’ personally identifiable information to file fraudulent tax returns in their names.

Mr Akande and his co-conspirators filed more than 1,000 fraudulent tax returns seeking over $8.1 million in fraudulent tax refunds over about five years and obtained over $1.3 million in fraudulent tax refunds, the U.S. Department of Justice said in a statement on Wednesday.

Mr Akande was sentenced by U.S. District Court Judge Indira Talwani to eight years in prison at a federal court in Boston and was ordered to pay $1,393,230 in restitution.

Arrested in October 2024 at Heathrow Airport in the United Kingdom and extradited to the United States on March 5, 2025.

According to the DoJ, Mr Akande was indicted by a federal grand jury in July 2022 with one count of conspiracy to obtain unauthorized access to protected computers in furtherance of fraud and to commit theft of government money and money laundering, one count of wire fraud, four counts of unauthorized access to protected computers in furtherance of fraud, 13 counts of theft of government money, and 14 counts of aggravated identity theft.

Mr Akande and his gang perpetrated their fraudulent scheme “stealing taxpayers’ PII from Massachusetts tax preparation firms via phishing attacks and computer intrusions”.

“To carry out the scheme, Akande caused fraudulent phishing emails to be sent to five Massachusetts tax preparation firms. The emails purported to be from a prospective client seeking the tax preparation firms’ services but in truth were used to trick the firms into downloading remote access trojan malicious software (RAT malware), including malware known as Warzone RAT.

“Akande used the RAT malware to obtain the PII and prior year tax information of the tax preparation firms’ clients, which Akande then used to cause fraudulent tax returns to be filed seeking refunds,” the DoJ said.

It noted that once the refunds were issued, those co-conspirators withdrew the stolen money in cash in the United States and then transferred a portion to third parties in Mexico, at Mr Akande’s direction, while keeping a portion for themselves.