A U.S. court has sentenced Joseph Nantomah, aka ‘The Black Mentor’, to four years in prison for his role in a $2.7 million investment fraud. In addition to the sentence, the court ordered Mr Nantomah to pay restitution to his victims of $2,762,798.37. He will serve three years of supervised release after his prison sentence and now risks deportation after completing the sentence.

The 49-year-old Nigerian, who entered the U.S. on a visitor’s visa in 2016, targeted mostly Nigerian immigrants, defrauding over 30 of them of $2.7 million, according to a statement by the U.S. Department of Justice on Monday.

Mr Nantomah’s public profile says he was born on December 31, 1976, in Borokiri, Port Harcourt, in Rivers state, and that he “founded a project management training programme in Lagos where he trained over 3,000 bankers from various institutions across Nigeria”.

Mr Nantomah entered the U.S. on a visitor’s visa in 2016. Within a few years, he had cultivated a false online persona alleging that he had built a multimillion-dollar real estate enterprise.

“Mr Nantomah gave himself the moniker, ‘The Black Mentor’, and hosted conferences and classes in which he purported to share his knowledge of building success in the United States with people he duped into paying for his classes. Mr Nantomah then used these classes to convince his ‘students’ to ‘invest’ in Nantomah’s real estate business,” the DOJ said. “Nantomah’s online presence, his “Wealth Flow” conferences, and his claims of growing a successful real estate business were all part of his scheme to defraud. Between May 2020 and December 2024, Nantomah stole $2,762,798.37 from at least 39 victims.”

Mr Nantomah posed as a real estate investor to target mostly Nigerian immigrants and people who were members of his church. Drawing on their shared cultural heritage and belief in the American Dream, Mr Nantomah convinced them to send him millions of dollars, which he claimed he would invest in real estate. He promised significant returns on investment. In reality, Nantomah had no legitimate business or real estate expertise.

“Mr Nantomah spent the majority of his victims’ funds on a lavish lifestyle that included private jets, luxury cars, expensive jewellery, and a yacht,” the DoJ said. “He also spent significant sums of his victims’ money cultivating his false online persona, including purchasing an honorary doctorate for himself and his wife and paying celebrities to attend his conferences.”

At his sentencing hearing, the judge, Lynn Adelman, noted that Mr Nantomah’s scheme warranted a significant period of incarceration because it “went on for a long time, caused substantial loss, and dramatically impacted the lives of numerous victims”.