Instagram Influencer Hushpuppi’s Rise Was Allegedly Fueled by Cyber Scams

1. The Fall of the Billionaire Gucci Master
■ 30 June 2021
LISTEN: Instagram Influencer Hushpuppi’s Rise Was Allegedly
Fueled by Cyber Scams

3. Authorities say Ramon Abbas, aka Hushpuppi, perfected a simple
internet scam and laundered millions of dollars. His past says a lot
about digital swagger, and the kinds of stories that get told online.
By Evan Ratliff
Illustrations by Randy Cano
For Ramon Abbas, the Instagram influencer popularly known as
Ray Hushpuppi, @hushpuppi, Hush, or the Billionaire Gucci
Master, birthdays were always a time for reflection. Reflection and
extravagance—but then, extravagance was Hushpuppi’s brand, a
365-days-a-year affair, a way of being. On Oct. 11, 2019, the day he
turned 37, he was living in a penthouse apartment at the Palazzo
Versace Dubai, with a private pool and hot tub on his lanai. A
typical @hushpuppi post on Instagram, where he had more than 2
million followers, featured Abbas smiling in front of one of his
Ferraris or Rolls-Royces, kicking back in his seat on a private jet, or
exiting a designer store with a passel of rope-handled bags—
#Hermes, #Fendi, #LouisVuitton. His look was always flawless:
never the same outfit twice, #Gucci more often than not. You don’t
become the Billionaire Gucci Master any other way.
Even back in 2019, there were questions about how much money
Abbas really had and how exactly he’d acquired it. In Nigeria,
where he was born, his Instagram presence had turned him into a
celebrity adjacent to the biggest names in pop culture. He'd

4. appeared on social media with pop idols Davido and WizKid and
soccer players on English clubs like Chelsea and Man City. But
Abbas’s wealth was the constant subject of rumors. In the
flourishing ecosystem of Nigerian gossip blogs he was “a Nigerian
big boy,” shorthand for an online fraudster, or “Yahoo Boy,” who’d
struck it rich and showed it off. Abbas dismissed the talk as the
jealousy of so many haters, disappointed with their own lives and
determined to bring down a self-made man who’d left them all
behind.
▲ Abbas, influencing in style.

5. Whatever the truth, on his 37th birthday, before heading off to a
party in his honor in the VIP lounge at the Dubai Burberry store,
Abbas paused to acknowledge the fans who’d supported him on his
journey from hustling kid to global influencer. “As I turn a year
older into my 30s today, I want to celebrate all of you out there,”
he wrote on Instagram. The caption accompanied a photo of Abbas
in a designer blue track suit, standing in front of a giant sculpture
of a Rolls-Royce hood ornament. “Those of you who mostly I have
never met, spoken to or anything but have been a strong supporter
of me through every situation until this point and still riding for
me, I want you to know wherever you are that I celebrate and
appreciate you today, today is OUR DAY!”
Several celebrity blogs printed his appreciation in full. The next
day, Tammy Abraham, the English striker who’d recently made his
debut for Chelsea, posted a photo of Hushpuppi captioned “Happy
birthday to my big bro for yesterday❤🙏.” Around the same time,
Abbas was giving a guided tour of his home to a popular Nigerian
radio personality named Daddy Freeze. (“What I was trying to
achieve with that interview was something close to MTV Cribs,”
Freeze told me recently.) With Freeze filming, they wandered
through the penthouse as Abbas showed off his clothes and
sneaker collections, and went down to the garage to visit the Rolls
and Ferraris. “I have four jacuzzis in this house, a sauna, my private

6. pool,” Abbas told the viewers back home. The apartment, he said,
cost “hundreds of thousands of dollars for a year.”
When the pair sat down for dinner, they talked at length about
online haters, religion, and family. Money came up only when
Abbas asserted that he often made charitable contributions that
never appeared on his feed. “My heart is pure. I do a lot of good that
even a lot of social media don’t have to know about,” he said. “I
sleep good at night. When something good happens to me, I know
it’s because I did good. Not because somebody promised me money
that I did not work for, or money that I don’t deserve.”
On Instagram, Abbas’s life was a blur of private helicopters and junkets
to the Greek isles.
Handling a jewel-encrusted watch made by a Nigerian designer.
Savoring a breakfast spread aboard a private jet in 2019.
What does it mean to deserve such fortune as Hushpuppi’s? What
type of work is commensurate with the riches of private jets and
$5,000 handbags? The Billionaire Gucci Master had his answers to
these questions, but so, too, did the FBI—answers that would form
the basis of United States of America v. Ramon Olorunwa Abbas, the
criminal case filed against him in a California federal court.
Just three days after his dinner with Daddy Freeze, the U.S.
government has alleged, Abbas found another reason to celebrate.

7. According to the federal indictments of him and his alleged co-
conspirator, on Oct. 15, 2019, a Chase Bank account Abbas
controlled in the U.S. received a wire transfer for $922,857.76. Sent
by a New York law firm, the money was meant to be a payment
owed to one of its clients, who’d refinanced a piece of real estate at
Citizens Bank. When a paralegal at the firm, identified only as K.C.,
emailed to confirm where the wire should be sent, she received a
fax telling her to direct the payment to Chase instead. K.C. called a
phone number on the fax to confirm the details and, when
everything seemed to match up, initiated the transfer.
In truth, everything did not match up. The fax and phone call had
come not from K.C.’s client but, according to court documents, from
someone in the orbit of Abbas—perhaps Abbas himself—who’d
inserted himself in the middle of the transaction. The gambit was
part of what’s known as a “business email compromise,” or BEC,
attack: a lucrative, varied, and elusive scam the government claims
Abbas and his co-conspirators have executed around the world.
BEC scams are increasingly common and exceedingly difficult to
stop.
From the Chase account, more than a third of the money was wired
to an account at the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce. The rest
was moved to different bank accounts. On Oct. 17, Abbas allegedly
sent an image of the $396,000 transfer to a Canadian American
from Toronto named Ghaleb Alaumary, who authorities say was

8. his partner in previous BEC-like scams. The government says that
Alaumary, Abbas, and a loose online confederation of other
figures—a group that at times included North Korean state-
sponsored hackers—targeted hundreds of millions of dollars in
payouts from businesses and banks, including more than $100
million from a single Premier League soccer club.
Alaumary messaged a third person to check that the money had
arrived in Canada. When the transfer was confirmed, he messaged
Abbas again.
“Sup bro,” Abbas responded.
“Confo u sent me today,” Alaumary said.
“Money came in?” Abbas asked.
Alaumary promised one. He was on a plane that had just landed, he
said, and he’d send the image as soon as he had a strong enough
signal. But the confirmation never came. Moments later, the FBI
approached Alaumary at the airport and placed him under arrest.
Successful BEC scams, such as the ones Alaumary and Abbas stand
accused of, always come off a bit like a magic trick. Phil in
accounting—or K.C. the paralegal, in the Abbas case—receives an
invoice, logs in to a payment system, and sends off what seems like
a routine payment. Then—poof!—the money is gone, having
seemingly evaporated en route to its intended destination. The

9. client of K.C.’s firm didn’t notice the money was missing until later
in October.
BEC attacks started appearing roughly a half-dozen years ago,
escalating each year until they surpassed all other forms of internet
fraud. The FBI reports there were almost 20,000 such scams
against American businesses in 2020 alone, accounting for $1.8
billion in losses, though the variety of BEC crimes can make totals
hard to pin down. Crane Hassold, the senior director of threat
research at the cyberdefense company Agari Data Inc. and a former
FBI analyst, likes to define a BEC as “a response-based
impersonation attack that’s requesting something of value”—
basically, posing as a legitimate business to trick people into giving
away their money.
No matter the flavor, a BEC scam generally begins with someone
hacking into a corporate email account often using social
engineering tactics like phishing. Once inside, the perpetrators
don’t steal anything, not at first. Instead they quietly begin
forwarding copies of incoming and outgoing email to themselves.
Then they wait. “They watch it for a number of weeks or months,
looking for details of certain payments that are going out,
understanding who their customers are, looking at communication
patterns,” Hassold says. When they spot an invoice coming in or
out, they “use that intelligence to insert themselves into an actual
payment that is supposed to be due.”

10. From there the scam can work two ways: If the scammers have
compromised the email of the intended recipient of the payment,
they simply create an invoice identical to the real one, swapping in
their own bank account details, and resend it from the recipient’s
email (often with apologies for the mix-up). If, on the other hand,
they’ve compromised the sender, they might send a follow-up
invoice from a “spoofed” email that appears at first glance to match
the payee’s, or even create an entire company and website, one
letter off from the real one. In either case, Phil in accounting sees
an email that, without careful scrutiny, matches the ones he
receives every day.
To the rest of us, it can seem absurd that a corporate employee
could send millions of dollars to the wrong bank account. “These
attacks are so realistic-looking, most people don’t give it a second
thought,” Hassold says. “Because when you’re involved in
payments like these, you see a lot of these emails every single day.
And when it doesn’t raise any red flags, you are not going to go up
the chain and do any confirmation. One would expect that when
you get into larger and larger and larger amounts of money that are
exchanging hands, that there would be some process that requires
secondary authorization or something like that. But in many cases,
that’s not what actually happens.”
Among the scammers, meanwhile, there tends to exist a hierarchy
of loosely networked players, most of whom take a small cut of the

11. total funds. There are those who are expert at breaking into email
accounts in the first place—“hackers,” let’s call them, though they
may not actually do any technical hacking to get in. There are the
“money mules,” often locals who’ve been tricked into opening bank
accounts, through romance scams and other ruses. Above them are
what Hassold calls “loaders” and the law calls money launderers:
the people controlling international accounts that can accept
millions of dollars in transfers and then reroute the money around
the world to be harvested by heist organizers.
For a crime that causes more losses than any other form of internet
fraud—40% of the cybercrime take in the U.S., according to the
FBI—BECs retain a strangely low profile. Only the largest cases
tend to break out of the tech and security press. This is partly
because BECs are humiliating for corporate victims. What New
York law firm wants to risk its clients’ trust, after all, by disclosing
that it unwittingly paid millions of dollars to a random fraudster
overseas?
Reported Cybercrime Losses in 2020, U.S.
Data: Internet Crime Complaint Center
Despite the money in play, the crime can seem technical and
pedestrian compared with the high-stakes drama of holding a
hospital or gas pipeline cyberhostage for ransom. “I think that most
people think of BEC attacks as just basic, boring attacks, and most

12. people don’t think it’s as big a problem as it actually is,” Hassold
says. “When you look at the amount of money that is actually lost
to ransomware, it’s a drop in the bucket compared to what’s lost in
BEC attacks.”
BECs are now a worldwide phenomenon, with networked online
gangs springing up everywhere from the U.S. to Russia to Brazil.
But while the scam’s origins are unclear, the cybersecurity
industry broadly assumes it began in Nigeria, because many
perpetrators have been traced there. “A lot of the same concepts
that go into these BEC attacks, criminals and scammers in West
Africa have been doing for decades at this point,” Hassold says.
“Those were all individually targeted social engineering attacks.
And essentially what happened was, around 2015, cybercriminals
started seeing that they could make more money targeting
businesses than they could targeting individuals.”
Where BECs Come From
Data: Agari
When he was still posting regularly, Abbas spoke often about
growing up in Oworonshoki, or Oworo as locals call it, on the
western edge of Lagos Lagoon. His father, a Muslim, worked as a
taxi driver, and his mother, a Christian, sold bread. Over his dinner
with Daddy Freeze in 2019, Hushpuppi said he’d gravitated toward
Islam, but his parents never pressured him to choose between

13. faiths—he has a cross tattooed on one bicep, a Koranic passage on
the other.
It’s natural for reporters to ask whether there’s some key in the
past of a figure such as Abbas, something that will unlock the
secrets to his alleged criminal motivations. But there’s a danger in
over-equating background with destiny. Adedeji Oyenuga, a
criminologist who studies cybercrime at Lagos State University,
spent several years in the mid-2000s living among a group of
Yahoo Boys who were making their living running scams in and
around the area where Abbas grew up. When I called him up this
spring, Oyenuga didn’t recall meeting Abbas but said some of the
former Yahoo Boys he knew did. “I know the principal of his
secondary school,” he said. “I know the area where he used to play.”
“Cybercrime is a metaphor for a more deep-seated and deep-rooted
problem”
Some of the neighborhood’s (generally) young (generally) men
began to drift into online scamming in the early 2000s, Oyenuga
says, when cybercafes first started opening across Lagos. They
congregated at a cafe in Bariga, the neighborhood adjacent to
Oworo, initially trying to make friends on message boards and in
chatrooms, like young people everywhere. But when they revealed
themselves as Nigerian, Oyenuga says, “nobody was interested in
them anymore.” A stereotype had preceded them onto the internet,

14. born out of the “Nigerian prince” scams of the 1990s that promised
a share of a supposed prince’s lost fortune if only the mark would
wire some money upfront to help retrieve it. With unemployment
rising, some of these young men eventually chose to embrace a
brand of fraud that became known—due to an early reliance on the
company’s free email accounts—simply as “Yahoo.” Social media
offered a virtually limitless number of targets, often referred to as
“magas,” local slang that translates roughly as “gullible marks” and
predates the Trump-era term.
The result was a remarkable level of criminal invention. Scams
evolved over a decade from money-order fraud to check-cashing
scams to romance scams to BECs—driven by a confluence of
untapped talent and an inept, perennially corrupt government.
“Cybercrime is a metaphor for a more deep-seated and deep-
rooted problem in Nigeria,” says Olayinka Akanle, a sociology
professor at the University of Ibadan who’s studied youth and
cybercrime. “When people face survival challenges, they innovate.
And when they innovate, if there is no system to address their
innovation in a very decisive way, it becomes the norm.”
Abbas, by his own account, felt the system had particularly
abandoned him. When a prominent Nigerian political activist
suggested in 2018 that the authorities investigate his source of
wealth, he responded with an impassioned Snapchat video
rebuttal. “My mother is from the Niger Delta part of Nigeria, where

15. Nigeria’s oil comes from,” he said. “She has never benefited one
dollar. One dollar! And she is over 60 years old.” He noted that he
was the first in his father’s family, going back generations, to
escape poverty, but he’d not been left unscathed by it; his sister
died of typhoid, he said, because of a medical bill the family
couldn’t pay. “Do you know how many families are suffering
different kinds of pain within their hearts, because of negligence of
the government?”
Pinning down precise details of when and where Abbas started his
alleged online hustle is difficult. Oyenuga gave me the number of a
man named Noah, who, he said, had known Abbas growing up.
When I reached Noah after weeks of trying, he hedged on the
question of how close they’d been, noting that he was much older
than Abbas. But then, while we were on the phone, he flagged down
another guy—off the street, from the sound of it—who introduced
himself only as “Jay.” Jay remembered Abbas as a friendly kid, he
said, never in trouble. But he had always cultivated an appetite for
luxury. “We called him Ramoni,” he recalled. “He was a fashionista.”
This account lines up with Abbas’s own recollections of his
childhood. During a live Instagram chat with a fellow influencer, he
once described scouring local stores for the cheapest designer
labels he could find, then reselling them around the neighborhood.
“I was buying it, and I couldn’t use it myself, and I was going to sell
it to people so I can make profits,” he said. To many of his

16. neighbors, he claimed, the wealthy business center of Lagos—“the
island,” as it’s known—seemed a world away. For Abbas, it fueled
his dreams. “I saw how people lived,” he recalled. Where once his
goal had been to own a motorcycle and a minibus, he began to see
a world beyond.
Sometime around 2014, his dreams lured him out of Lagos to Kuala
Lumpur, part of what Oyenuga describes as “an exodus of young
Yahoo Boys from Nigeria to Malaysia, to the U.S., to the U.K., and to
India.” Oyenuga says he thinks that Abbas managed his money
better than many of his compatriots and that he left for a base from
which it was simpler to operate online. “He went to study, he told
me,” says Sikiru Adekoya, a childhood friend of Abbas’s who goes
by Pac. “When he left for Malaysia, we lost contact.”
In Nigeria, meanwhile, cybercrime had increasingly become a
pretext for police abuses. The Economic and Financial Crimes
Commission (EFCC), the agency tasked with investigating digital
fraud and money laundering, regularly nabs low-level local
grifters, parading their mug shots on social media. But as online
scams flourished in the 2000s, the heavily armed Special Anti-
Robbery Squad, or SARS—a law enforcement division founded in
the 1990s to address a rash of robberies and kidnappings—
somehow also claimed cybercrime as its purview. The unit became
notorious for its brazen extortion and torture of suspects, with

17. unfounded fraud accusations sometimes serving as the excuse for
both.
“Their response has been to arrest and to extrajudicially kill people
who they think look like Yahoo Boys, young professionals with
laptops and cellphones,” says Matthew Page, who researches
Nigerian corruption as an associate fellow at Chatham House, a
London think tank. “That has been the worst side effect of a rise in
cybercrime: the vilification of a lot of people, fingered as Yahoo
Boys with no real evidence whatsoever. Meanwhile, Hushpuppi is
living the good life in Dubai, and some insurance salesman is
getting shot in the head in a back alley in Lagos, because the police
have decided he’s a Yahoo Boy.”
I asked Jay, the man on the street who said he’d known Abbas, if he
knew why he’d had left the country. “Everybody wants to leave
Nigeria,” he said. “Nigeria’s a hard place.”

18. Once on his feet in Kuala Lumpur, Abbas transformed into
@hushpuppi, picking up the Instagram handle he’d claimed in
2012 but rarely used. Many of his early photos were taken in a
modest apartment kitchen, but he had a natural presence on
camera. The photos most often framed him from head to toe, his
left leg slightly ahead of the right to show his full outfit, shoes
included. His smile, usually mouth closed with eyes alight, was
confident, ambitious, a little sly. Soon he was getting thousands of
likes per post, and his captions began to reflect his own flavor of
prosperity gospel. He included bits of wisdom on living your best
life and mini-lectures about how far he’d already come—and how
others could do the same.

19. @hushpuppi “God opens millions of flowers without forcing the
buds, it tells us not to force anything for things will happen in the
right time. #HappySunday #LouisVuitton #Versace #VersaceBelt
#VersaceRing #FranckMuller
@hushpuppi “Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its
ability to climb a tree, it will live it’s whole life believing that it is
stupid. #versace #versacemedusa #Versaceshoes #Versacebelt
#Versacering #versacesneakers #Medusa #sneakers #sneakerhead
#SneakerRoleModel”
Back then, his thoughts often contained a measure of humility and
appreciation. He was seeking an audience, feeling out his voice.
“There are people out there who have it way worse than I do, that’s
why I dont care if the glass is half empty or half full,” he wrote in
March 2014. “I’m grateful I have a glass at all. Sure I want more,
sure I want better but I’m not going to let what I don’t have make
me take for granted what I do have.”
Absent from his missives was any explanation for his growing
wealth. But there may have been hints, if you knew where to look.
In January 2015 the Versace store in Kuala
Lumpur presented Hushpuppi and a friend, Samson Oyekunle,
with gifts celebrating their status as the best customers of 2014.
Naturally, Hushpuppi documented the event in an Instagram post:
He and Oyekunle, who went by @evertipsysmiley on Instagram,

20. open their gifts as Hushpuppi describes having just spent $20,000
in the store. Not long afterward, Oyekunle relocated to Houston,
and in February 2017 federal authorities arrested him and charged
him with participating in multiple BEC frauds. He pleaded guilty to
opening bank accounts across Houston to facilitate the schemes
with unnamed co-conspirators outside the U.S. and was sentenced
to five years in prison.
By that time, Abbas had moved to Dubai. He’d been spending time
there as his fortune grew, first in the company of Ismaila Mustapha,
a fellow influencer who goes by Mompha. “Having an amazing time
with the bro @mompha before our flight to MY beautiful Malaysia,”
he posted in 2015. “My first time ever in a Louboutin store🙈, 6
pairs ain’t bad to add to the collection 👟👞💪💪💪✈✈✈.” Their
Instagram styles tracked each other closely: luxury cars, designer
clothes, and watches. In late 2016, the pair’s names were featured
in Living Things, a song celebrating their brand of opulent living by
the Nigerian musician 9ice.
As Abbas’s profile grew, so did his appetite for online beefs—a fail-
safe way for the world’s influencers to expand their followings.
First came a 2017 tiff with the pop star Davido, who Abbas claimed
had failed to pay his tab at a Lagos nightclub. (The two soon made
up in an online video posted on Davido’s Snapchat, further raising
Hushpuppi’s profile.) Next he accused musicians Phyno and Ice

21. Prince of wearing fake luxury watches. “We are not on d same level
mate,” Phyno shot back. “U live and die for Gucci … I will live and
die for my pple.” The unknown source of Hushpuppi’s wealth was
a recurring theme of his would-be rivals’ responses. “You have no
credibility, no known source of income and yet you come on social
media to attack hard working Nigerian musicians with traceable
wealth?” the singer Kcee posted. “Really, what do you do for a
living, what is your talent, how did you make your money, what
brand do you represent?” Nigeria’s EFCC, he concluded, “Needs to
start paying more ‘Attention to detail.’ ”
Eventually, Abbas’s penchant for beefs also consumed his
friendship with Mompha, who claimed Abbas had leeched off him
when he arrived in Dubai. He’d given Abbas a place to stay and
sponsored his Dubai visa, he claimed in one post, and “Still u wanna
stab me at the back by using my personal account for fraudulent
act and sending me to jail.” He added: “Try go help ur taxi driver
father and ur bread seller mama and stop living fake life on social
media.” Abbas lobbed back that Mompha, whom he’d treated “as
an elder brother I never had,” had betrayed him. “You borrow my
clothes for the gram yet you are the one quick to run to the gram to
say someone else is living a fake life,” he wrote. “If this life is fake, I
don’t want a real one.” He also accused Mompha of helping launder
money for Nigerian politicians.

22. As each story churned its way through the gossip blogs,
Hushpuppi’s following ticked up. He’d become an aspirational
figure to millions, offering opulence without apology, consumption
without regret. Back home he was nearing full-blown celebrity
status. In May 2017 he posted a photo of himself in a hot tub with
a glass of wine, the stunning coast of the Greek island Santorini
stretched out behind him. “Letter to the Ghetto Kid,” the several-
hundred-word caption began. “As a man that I am today who
developed from being one of you guys, who went through the same
struggles you are presently going through … I know the society do
not expect you to make it.”
“I am you, you are me,” he continued. “I represent every under
privilege kid of the world and especially of Nigeria and of Lagos and
of Bariga and of Oworonsoki.”

23. ▲ Abbas in his signature Gucci overlooking the island of Santorini.
Abbas did bring friends from his old neighborhood to Dubai,
including Pac, who goes by @officialpac02 on Instagram. A
plumber by trade who’s known Abbas since they were teens, Pac
says that after he lost his construction job in Nigeria, Abbas
supported him and then suggested he come to the United Arab
Emirates. Abbas managed real estate there, he told Pac, and could
help him find work. Soon, Pac was living in Abbas’s four-bedroom
penthouse at the Palazzo Versace and showing up as an occasional
wingman in his friend’s posts. On his own Instagram page, he was
a full-time Hushpuppi hype man, wearing a custom “Team Hush”

24. tracksuit and offering earnest appreciation for what Abbas had
done for him. “Thank God 4 bringing @Hushpuppi 2my way,”
he posted on his birthday in 2017, beneath a photo of him with
Abbas on a private jet.
Among the figures who passed through both men’s feeds was a
lesser influencer named Olalekan Jacob Ponle, or @mrwoodbery.
With a follower count still in the tens of thousands, he was a grade
below Hushpuppi, but he was on the rise. Slimmer and taller than
Abbas, always in sunglasses, he deployed a similar caption style.
One day he stood, head bowed, in front of a yellow Lamborghini.
“To get through the toughest journeys you need take only one step
at a time, but you have to keep on stepping without doubting ✨🔵,”
he wrote.
Hushpuppi, for his part, appeared to be moving beyond mere flashy
purchasing power and entering the stratospheric consumption of
the superrich. And brands were taking note. Stores lavished perks
on Hushpuppi and his friends—elaborate birthday cakes, custom
shoes, engraved Rolls-Royce nameplates. Once, Hushpuppi said,
he’d been denied a French visa when trying to escape Nigeria. Now
he was posting about staying at the Ritz Paris for Fashion Week as
an all-expenses-paid, VIP guest of Louis Vuitton.

25. ▲ Ponle, aka @mrwoodbery.
The good life wasn’t going to maintain itself, though. The U.S.
government alleges that in January 2019, Abbas received a
message from Alaumary, the Canadian online money mover. (In
Hassold’s parlance, both men would be loaders.) Alaumary, who
went by G, Backwood, and Big Boss online, was a mustachioed 35-
year-old who grew up in Ontario. He’d been helping to cash out BEC
scams for years, including swindling a Canadian university out of
$10 million in 2017. In Alaumary’s phone, Abbas was listed as
Hush, and the pair communicated on Snapchat, where he operated
as hushpuppi5. Alaumary told Abbas he needed a pair of bank

26. accounts in Europe, each able to receive €5 million ($6.1 million)
without attracting attention. The money would arrive on Feb. 12.
Abbas replied with details for a Romanian bank account he said
could handle “large amounts.”
The payouts, it turned out, would be coming from the Bank of
Valletta Plc in Malta, a commercial and investment bank with
offices around Europe. It had been compromised months before, in
an unconventional and ambitious BEC-style scam. According
to reporting in the Times of Malta, the hackers had first broken into
the French stock exchange regulator, Autorité des Marchés
Financiers. Then, posing as French regulators, they’d sent phishing
emails to the Bank of Valletta. When an employee took the bait and
clicked, the attackers were granted access to the bank’s secure
payment systems, where they prepared to send out a series of
undetected payouts.
In a separate indictment, the U.S. government claims the hackers
were agents of the North Korean government, which the U.S. says
has been on a $1.3 billion cybercrime spree since 2014, including
more than $1 billion in digital bank heists and the creation of the
notorious ransomware WannaCry, which was used to hack Sony
Pictures Entertainment. It’s unclear whether Alaumary even knew
the nature of his collaborators, but no matter: His role was to move
the proceeds around the world as quickly as possible. “My
associates want u to clear as soon it hits,” he wrote to Abbas, saying

27. the money could be recalled if the victim noticed the theft. “If they
don’t notice we keep pumping.”
On Hushpuppi’s Instagram, meanwhile, it was business as usual.
Jan. 24 found him lounging on a plush orange couch at Dubai’s
Louis Vuitton. “Mature enough to wish the best for people I no
longer talk to and real enough to mean it ✌,” he wrote.
On Feb. 1 he heard from Alaumary again. “12th February they
doing it,” he messaged, now saying he needed four bank accounts
that could each accommodate millions of euros. Six days later,
Alaumary was up to six accounts. “I have 6 slots in total,” he wrote
Abbas. “All 5m Euro. Big hit in 12th feb. They will all credit same
time.”
On Feb. 9, Abbas posted from his suite in Dubai: “The goal is to be
valuable. Once you’re valuable instead of chasing money, you will
attract it #Fendi #Hermes #Hublot #Versace #Dubai.”
The next day, Alaumary gave him one more chance to deliver
another bank account. “Brother tonight is my dead line to submit
anything more,” he messaged. “Do u want add one more or just
stick to that one u gave me?” Abbas sent back details for a second
account, this one in Bulgaria.
When Feb. 12 arrived, Alaumary wrote to Abbas to say that only
one of the wires had gone through: €500,000 to the Romanian

28. bank account, masked as a payment from Tipico, an online sports-
betting company based in Malta. “Brother, we still have access and
they didn’t realize,” he said, triumphantly. “We gonna shoot again
tomoro am.”
But by the next morning, the alleged scheme had unraveled. “Today
they noticed and pressed a recall on it, it might show and block or
never show,” Alaumary lamented. “Look it hit the news,” he said,
sending a screenshot. The Bank of Valletta had discovered that the
hackers had moved €13 million out the door. They quickly shut
down their entire electronic system and began desperately trying
to claw back the money. (The bank would later say it had recovered
most of it.)
“Next one is in few weeks will let U know when it’s ready,”
Alaumary wrote. “To bad they caught on or it would been a nice
payout.”
Easy come, easy go, and Abbas wasn’t about to let it kill his social
media vibe. The next day, Feb. 14, he posted a photo of himself in a
patterned Fendi jumpsuit, leaning against a spotless black car,
palm trees in the background. “Bought myself a new Bentley
Bentayga for Valentines,” he wrote. The car retails for $160,000.
“The best way to celebrate the season of love.”

34. ▲ Abbas’s tastes were nothing if not consistent.

35. If the criminal complaint against him is any guide, Abbas wasn’t as
cautious in his communications as large-scale money laundering
might warrant. He communicated with Alaumary using his main
Dubai cell number, linking it to an email,
rayhushpuppi@gmail.com, attached to his Instagram and Snapchat
accounts. He maintained at least two other phones, but they were
easily traceable back to him. In his alleged plotting with Alaumary,
he seemed to lack even the basics of operational security.
Still, according to the authorities, the jobs kept coming. In April
2019, Alaumary returned with the prospect of a massive haul:
$300 million in total, this time from the U.K. “My guy r changing acc
on file for 100m contracts and there payment are once or twice a
week 1-5m,” he wrote. Alaumary’s associates, in other words, had
penetrated an organization and would be swapping in bank
account details for weekly installments on a £100 million ($142
million) contract. The money, he told Abbas, would be coming from
an English Premier League team.
There was precedent in the global soccer world for exactly this
kind of BEC scheme, applied to the payment of lucrative player
transfers. In 2018, four years after the Italian club Lazio bought
defender Stefan de Vrij from the Dutch club Feyenoord, BEC
fraudsters sent the Italians an official-looking email with
Feyenoord’s logo, directing the €2 million final installment of his
transfer fee to their own Dutch bank account.

36. The authorities have yet to allege whether Alaumary’s heist was
meant to target a similar transaction, such as the reported £100
million fee paid to Chelsea for Eden Hazard’s transfer to Real
Madrid in 2019, or perhaps one of the payments Tottenham
Hotspur made that year for its new £850 million stadium. But after
Abbas allegedly provided Alaumary an account in Mexico to start
receiving payments—from the English club and a £200 million job
in Scotland—the Canadian discovered that the U.K. banks were
refusing to pay into it. It was too bad, Alaumary said; his U.K. bank
accounts were cleaning up.
By Hushpuppi’s birthday that fall, according to the indictment, the
pair had found smaller-scale success with the law firm heist. Then,
just as the money came in, Alaumary disappeared into the hands of
the FBI.
The next day, Abbas’s old friend Mompha was arrested at a
Nigerian airport by agents from the EFCC and charged with fraud
and money laundering. (Mompha didn’t respond to Instagram
messages seeking comment, and his attorney didn’t respond to a
request for comment.) In public, Abbas seemed
uncharacteristically disinclined to gloat over his rival’s downfall.
On Oct. 25, he captioned a phototaken in the Dubai Rolls-Royce
dealership with a warning: “In life, we all at a point will go through
trial times, don’t be quick to mock anyone or use anyone’s trial time
as tool to chase clout, yours will come and you might not survive it.

37. We all look up to God to guide and get us through these times. I
wish and pray for everyone in every part of the world going
through a dark time to come out of it and become better people and
God be with their families. #GodHealsAllWounds
#WishEveryoneGoodAtAllTimes #NoOneIsHoly #Hermes
#Balenciaga #Hublot #RollsRoyce #Dubai.”
A few days later, the gossip blogs noted that he’d changed his
Instagram bio from “Billionaire Gucci Master” to “Real Estate
Developer.”
▲ Abbas en route to a fashion show in 2019.

38. Abbas’s friend Pac says that while he was enjoying the fruits of
Hushpuppi’s lifestyle in Dubai, tagging along to clubs and hopping
planes, behind the scenes he had little luck finding work. “All the
jobs they are offering me, the money was so low,” Pac says. “Maybe
the same that I could make in Nigeria.” By early 2020 he was ready
to return home and start his own business, but his departure was
delayed by a bout of appendicitis. Abbas paid the medical bills for
his emergency appendectomy. By the time he’d recovered, in
March, Covid protocols had arrived and Nigeria was suspending
flights from the UAE.
Never one to tone down his influencing, Hushpuppi continued to
push his brand of consumptive positivity through the pandemic. In
April 2020 he posted a video of himself taking a bubble bath in his
lanai hot tub, with the caption “My quarantine and your quarantine
are not mates.” He followed that up by reposting an old photo of
himself carrying Gucci bags onto a private jet. “Fellow inmates,
Where’s the first place you flying after this is over and with who?”
he asked.
Perhaps sensing there was something perverse in this approach,
he tried going political. “While you’re sanitizing and wiping
everything down, be sure [to] wipe racism, hatred and jealousy out
of your heart,” he wrote beneath a May photo of himself leaning on
a white Rolls, smiling and gazing out of frame. “That too is a virus

39. #LouisVuitton #RichardMille #RollsRoyce #Dubai
#BlackLivesMatter.”
By then, however, Abbas and his compatriot Ponle, aka
@mrwoodbery, were fully in the grip of a different invisible enemy.
The FBI’s High-Tech Organized Crime Squad had been analyzing
Alaumary’s devices since his arrest, uncovering the easily
decipherable links to Hushpuppi’s phones and accounts. They’d
also pegged Ponle as the orchestrator behind millions of dollars in
bank accounts and Bitcoin wallets used in BEC scams. For months,
the FBI had been coordinating with the UAE authorities to surveil
both men and their suspected associates.
Sometime between midnight and 1 a.m. on Monday, June 8, Pac was
up watching the news in Abbas’s apartment while Abbas slept
upstairs. Suddenly the front door burst open, and the apartment
was flooded with black-clad men brandishing weapons. Pac’s first
thought was armed robbers, but it was a Dubai police SWAT team,
fully kitted up and looking for Hushpuppi. They ordered Pac onto
the floor along with another Nigerian friend, who’d come to Dubai
on vacation and moved in with Abbas when flights home were
canceled. The police took their phones and demanded to know
where Abbas was, where his laptops were, and where his money
was.

40. The agents found him upstairs, wearing a white designer T-shirt
and his signature chin strap beard, looking dazed. Later, Dubai
police would announce that he’d been captured in one of six
simultaneous raids that led to the arrests of 12 suspects, including
Ponle, Pac, and a Nigerian photographer named Kelvin Ogidika
who often hung out with them. They claimed to have confiscated
47 phones, 21 laptops, $7 million worth of cars, and $40 million.
According to Pac, the suspects were taken to police headquarters
and jailed separately. After four days a Dubai prosecutor
questioned them first, followed by FBI agents, who asked about
Abbas and the source of his money. “They said didn’t I know my
friend was a fraudster?” Pac says. “I didn’t know him as a fraudster.
I know him as a businessman. They said, ‘What did he invest on?’ I
told them he invested in real estate management.” They told him if
he provided them with evidence of Abbas’s crimes he’d be
released. Otherwise he could spend the rest of his life in a Dubai
prison. “When the FBI came, I told the FBI the same thing,” he says.
Abbas had only ever told him that he was a real estate investor and
that he changed money for African bigwigs who came to Dubai to
shop. He’d never even seen his friend use a laptop in the apartment.
Abbas and Ponle, seemingly the only captives of interest to the FBI,
were quickly put on a plane to the U.S. The other 10 arrested men—
whose names dribbled out in the Nigerian press and which I was
able to confirm in a presentation given by the Dubai police chief—

41. disappeared into the opaque UAE justice system without charges
or lawyers. “They didn’t even take us to court,” Pac says.
In a way, Abbas’s case only serves to highlight how rarely BEC crimes
are investigated and prosecuted
The Dubai police were so pleased with the raid they
quickly released a video of the affair styled as an action film trailer,
titled Operation Fox Hunt 2, with versions narrated in Arabic and
English. (Operation Fox Hunt 1 had been an unrelated roundup of
fraud suspects the previous February.) “Dubai police have once
again solved yet another case involving an international online
scammer,” a solemn voice intoned over quick-cut footage of the
police bursting into the Palazzo apartment. Interspersed with the
raid were images from Hushpuppi’s Instagram feed and stock
video of people typing on computer screens, including one showing
the word “HACKING,” followed by “HACKED” above a skull and
crossbones. The video bordered on parody, but it had the intended
effect, racing across the internet. All sides, it seemed, were
optimizing for social media virality.
Abbas and Ponle were flown to Chicago, where Ponle remains,
facing trial. Abbas, after a preliminary hearing, was transferred to
Los Angeles to face multiple charges of money laundering and wire
fraud. (The Dubai police also claimed that Abbas or his co-
conspirators committed fraud involving Covid ventilators and

42. personal protective equipment but haven’t presented any evidence
in public.) In the initial hearings, Abbas’s lawyer asserted that he
had earned his living legitimately, through his influencing. In
January, Abbas and the attorney parted ways, citing “irreconcilable
disagreements regarding the theory of defense,” and Abbas
replaced him with an L.A.-based attorney who declined to
comment on the case.
Abbas himself didn’t respond to a letter sent to him in jail. A
spokesperson for the office of the U.S. Attorney for the Central
District of California declined to comment, citing the pending case,
and the FBI didn’t respond to repeated requests for comment. In
one ominous sign for Abbas, last fall Alaumary elected to plead
guilty to money laundering charges, saying he conspired with
Abbas in the law firm BEC scam, the Malta bank heist, and the
Premier League scam. He also pleaded guilty to separate BEC
charges in the state of Georgia. Alaumary’s attorney declined to
comment.
In a way, Abbas’s case only serves to highlight how rarely BEC
crimes are investigated and prosecuted. “There are two issues
from a law enforcement perspective,” says Hassold, the former FBI
analyst. “One is just the volume of it. There aren’t nearly enough
FBI agents, Secret Service agents, to come close to being able to
investigate all of this.” The other issue, he says, is that major actors
such as Abbas are typically overseas, requiring complex

43. international operations to extract them. “I think probably what
rose Hushpuppi up the list was the amount of money he was clearly
making,” Hassold says. “And not only the amount of money he was
making, but he was also flaunting it out there on places like
Instagram.” (No matter how many millions Abbas’s alleged cut
amounted to, he’s arguably still a patsy for the likes of the alleged
North Korean hackers, who U.S. authorities say took home the bulk
of the loot and remain safe in their home country.)
To Hassold’s point, the agents who filed the criminal complaint
against Abbas appeared to delight in noting his online
extravagances, pausing to describe in detail the photos and
captions, hashtags included, they’d used to verify his identity.
Perhaps most cutting, they’d used Abbas’s own birthday posts,
matching them to his Nigerian passport and one he’d recently
obtained from St. Kitts and Nevis. An agent wrote that he’d seen a
post on Oct. 11, 2017, “of a birthday cake with the inscription
‘Happy Birthday Ramon’ and the caption ‘Thanks so much @gucci
for this special. God bless you guys at the Dubai Mall Gucci
Store!!!’ ”
The companies that benefited from Hushpuppi’s largesse over the
years, and often repaid him with merchandise and trips, haven’t
exactly rushed to his defense since his indictment was unsealed.
No public-relations representative from Gucci, Fendi, or Louis
Vuitton responded to requests for comment for this story. The

44. same brands had welcomed him at high-gloss events and exclusive
fashion shows. “He had a lot of followers, and one of the PR team
invited him,” was all that a representative of Rich List Group, an
events organization in Dubai that had hosted Abbas at a Formula
One race, would say. Pac told me that at least some of what Abbas
showed off on social media was loaned to him solely for his
Instagram.
How much of his Gucci lifestyle was on loan from various brands
may end up a tangential subject in the trial. “It does raise a really
important set of questions about the ethics of marketing and how
that intersects with the rise of influencers,” says Mehita Iqani, a
professor at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa
who’s studied digital marketing in the global south. “What
responsibility do they have to do due diligence when they are
choosing or recruiting an influencer?”
After the pageantry of the Operation Fox Hunt 2 video, the Dubai
police also refused to comment on the case and said nothing about
the fate of the 10 other suspects swept up in the raid. Pac says they
were shuffled from prison to prison for five months, deprived of
the chance to bathe for weeks on end, and subjected to other
abuses he wouldn’t discuss. In November they were abruptly
transferred to immigration custody and told they needed to find
the funds for their own plane tickets home—without the clothes,
phones, or cash confiscated from them. “They said I’m at the wrong

45. place at the wrong time,” Pac says. (Ogidika, the photographer,
reappeared on social media after his release. When I wrote to his
email address, an anonymous representative replied to say he’d be
releasing his own documentary on the incident.)
Pac told me he’s struggling to regain his footing back in Nigeria. “I
hardly eat now, hardly go out,” he says. “At times I don’t have
money to fill my car.” With no official recognition of his innocence,
he’s found his bank accounts blocked. But through it all, he remains
loyal to his friend. “Ramon is like my brother—anything that
happens to him happens to me,” he says. “When I lost my job, at
times he sent money to me. At times when I had any problem, I
called him, and he solved these problems for me.”

46. ▲ Abbas in front of the Burj Al Arab hotel in Dubai in 2019.
Within Nigeria, mass public protests against the Special Anti-
Robbery Squad broke out in cities across the country in October,
after a video surfaced showing what the video’s original poster
described as an extrajudicial killing. The protests quickly expanded
to encompass wider issues of corruption and inequality, but the
University of Ibadan’s Akanle says the uprising was partly driven
by a whole generation who’ve found themselves treated like
fraudsters. “It was so bad that if you use an iPhone, they think that
you are a Yahoo guy,” Akanle says. “There is this profiling that has
made it very difficult for the youth to breathe.” After 10 days of

47. mass protests in the streets, the government pledged to disband
the SARS unit. Days later, the police opened fire on protesters,
killing 12.
I wondered how Hushpuppi would have weighed in on the
protests. For anyone arriving on his feed these days, with the
knowledge of his case, his opulence takes on a different cast. With
his last post more than a year old, the top comments are all from
dozens, sometimes hundreds, of gawkers who have come to mock
his hubris. “The cops got a nice sneaker collection now 😂,” reads a
typical gloat. “No more gucci in jail!” sneers another. Nigeria is
home to a vibrant tech scene, particularly in financial technology,
and stories such as Abbas’s are a source of exasperation,
strengthening the current of negative perceptions that legitimate
tech workers already swim against.
But Hushpuppi was also a celebrity, after all. Dig down further, and
you can find the fans, the inspired, the people who genuinely
seemed to get something from the gospel Hushpuppi preached and
the hustle he purported to represent. He retains plenty of vocal
supporters in Nigeria—those who think he’s innocent and those
who won’t judge him if he’s guilty. His trial is scheduled for the end
of July, and many fans hold out hope that he’ll somehow escape and
return to his old life. New influencers have stepped up to claim the
mantle of the Gucci Master—including Abbas’s frenemy Mompha,
who’s returned to Dubai since his release by the Nigerian EFCC—

48. but none quite matches Abbas’s verve and drip. The gossip blogs
continue to track every minor development in Hushpuppi’s case.
For now we’re left with the wisdom of his final post, on June 7,
2020, two days before his arrest. “May success and prosperity not
be a ‘once upon a time’ story in your life … 🙏” he wrote, alongside
a photo that uncharacteristically—prophetically, even—featured a
sparkling white luxury SUV, with Hushpuppi himself out of the
frame. “Thank you lord for the many blessings in my life 🙏🙏
continue to shame those waiting for me to be shamed 🙏🙏🙏