What happened
Obinwanne Okeke, a Nigerian businessman known as Invictus Obi, was arrested at Dulles Airport in August 2019, pleaded guilty in June 2020 and was sentenced on February 16, 2021 to 10 years in federal prison. Between 2015 and 2019 he ran computer-enabled fraud including a April 2018 attack on Unatrac Holding Limited, the UK export sales office for Caterpillar equipment, where a phished CFO mailbox was used to send about $11 million in fraudulent wire instructions.
How the deception worked
The crew sent a credential-phishing email to Unatrac's chief financial officer that harvested his Microsoft Office 365 login. With mailbox access, they read pending payment correspondence, then sent roughly fifteen fraudulent transfer requests and payment approvals over eight days in April 2018 that appeared to come directly from the CFO. Fake invoices and altered supplier banking details supported the requests, and finance staff processed them as ordinary executive-approved payments because they arrived from the genuine internal account. Funds were routed to overseas accounts. The company recognized the fraud only after the CFO's mailbox behavior and the missing payments were reconciled in June 2018.
AI involvement · No AI reported
No AI or synthetic media reported.
The control that would have caught it· our reading, not a claim from the sources
Multifactor authentication on executive mailboxes plus monitoring for anomalous mailbox rules and sign-ins would have blocked the takeover that made every downstream approval look authentic.
Sources (1)
This entry summarises public reporting. It is not a legal finding, and details can change as investigations conclude. Found an error? Send a correction.