Temitope Oluwaseun Bashua was sentenced last year over a pandemic relief scheme that netted more than $290,000
US immigration officers say they have removed Temitope Oluwaseun Bashua, a Nigerian national convicted of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and aggravated identity theft, as part of a wider set of deportations announced this week.
US Immigration and Customs Enforcement posted the case on 23 September. In a thread highlighting recent removals, the agency wrote that “gang members, rapists, drug traffickers, and other violent criminals have been REMOVED by the patriots of ICE.” A later post named Mr Bashua and described him as “an illegal alien from Nigeria.”
Court records and a Department of Justice statement from November 2025 set out a financial crime case. Mr Bashua, who was 29 at sentence, appeared before US District Judge Stephanie A. Gallagher in Baltimore. He received 30 months in prison and two years of supervised release after pleading guilty to a conspiracy to obtain unemployment insurance payments and Economic Injury Disaster Loans by impersonating other people.
According to his plea agreement, the scheme ran from May 2020 to September 2022. Mr Bashua and others used stolen personal details, without the victims’ knowledge or consent, to file false unemployment claims in Maryland and California. In October 2020, accomplices also submitted two false disaster loan applications to the Small Business Administration for fictitious firms, again using stolen identities. Prosecutors said Mr Bashua received more than $290,000 in US Treasury funds from those loan applications.
He also admitted involvement in other frauds, including cyber intrusion, romance fraud and business email compromise. An indictment filed in the District of Maryland in December 2023 charged conspiracy to commit wire fraud, wire fraud and aggravated identity theft. It listed the alias Peppersneh Mega. Homeland Security Investigations in Baltimore was among the agencies that announced the sentence.
Pandemic unemployment and disaster loan schemes were widely abused in the United States. Federal strike forces were set up to pursue CARES Act fraud, and prosecutors have brought hundreds of cases against both citizens and foreign nationals. Mr Bashua’s sentence reflected the scale of the money obtained and his admitted role in several overlapping scams.
There was an indictment of Mr Bashua in late 2023, a guilty plea in 2025, sentence on 20 November 2025, later appearance on the DHS removal register, and ICE’s claim this week that he has been removed. He helped steal identities, obtained more than $290,000 from Covid relief funds, admitted further online fraud, served a federal sentence, and has now, according to ICE, been sent out of the United States.
By A.Ikechukwu
