A Nigerian man has been sentenced to eight years in prison in the United States for his role in a sophisticated cyber fraud operation that involved hacking into tax preparation firms and filing more than 1,000 fraudulent tax returns.
Matthew A. Akande, 37, a Nigerian national who had been living in Mexico, was sentenced on Tuesday, 17 February 2026, by US District Court Judge Indira Talwani in federal court in Boston, Massachusetts. He will serve three years of supervised release following his prison term and has been ordered to pay $1,393,230 (£1,090,000 approx.) in restitution.
Akande was arrested in October 2024 at Heathrow Airport in London at the request of US authorities and extradited to the United States on 5 March 2025. He had been indicted in July 2022 on multiple charges, including conspiracy to obtain unauthorised access to protected computers in furtherance of fraud, to commit theft of government money, and money laundering; wire fraud; unauthorised access to protected computers in furtherance of fraud; theft of government money; and aggravated identity theft.
Between approximately June 2016 and June 2021, Akande collaborated with others to defraud the US government by stealing taxpayers’ personally identifiable information (PII) and using it to submit fraudulent tax returns in the victims’ names. The scheme targeted Massachusetts-based tax preparation firms through phishing emails that appeared to come from prospective clients seeking tax services.
These emails tricked employees into downloading remote access Trojan malware, including a variant known as Warzone RAT. Akande and his co-conspirators then exploited this access to steal clients’ PII and prior-year tax details, which were used to file bogus returns claiming refunds.
The fraudulent refunds were directed to bank accounts in the United States opened by accomplices. Once the funds were deposited, the co-conspirators withdrew the money in cash and transferred portions to third parties in Mexico under Akande’s instructions, while retaining some for themselves.
In total, the group filed over 1,000 fraudulent tax returns seeking more than $8.1 million (£6 million approx.) in refunds, successfully obtaining over $1.3 million (£970,000 approx.) from the scheme.
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