A U.S. federal court has sentenced Nigerian national Matthew A. Akande to eight years in prison for orchestrating a cyber fraud scheme that defrauded the U.S. government of more than $1.3 million
The sentence was handed down on Tuesday by U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani at a federal court in Boston, Massachusetts. In addition to the prison term, Akande, 37, was ordered to pay $1,393,230 in restitution and serve three years of supervised release after completing his sentence.
Akande, who had been living in Mexico prior to his arrest, was apprehended in October 2024 at Heathrow Airport in the United Kingdom at the request of U.S. authorities and extradited to the United States on March 5, 2025.
He was previously indicted in July 2022 by a federal grand jury on multiple charges, including conspiracy, wire fraud, unauthorized access to protected computers, theft of government funds, and aggravated identity theft.
Authorities revealed that between June 2016 and June 2021, Akande and accomplices targeted Massachusetts tax preparation firms through phishing attacks. Fraudulent emails, disguised as messages from prospective clients, tricked recipients into installing remote-access malware, including Warzone RAT.
Using the stolen data, Akande and his co-conspirators accessed clients’ personal information and prior-year tax records to file over 1,000 fraudulent tax returns, seeking more than $8.1 million in refunds. Of this, more than $1.3 million was successfully paid out into accounts controlled by his associates in the U.S. Some of the stolen funds were then transferred to third parties in Mexico under Akande’s direction, while the rest was retained by the conspirators.
The U.S. Department of Justice described the operation as a coordinated effort to steal taxpayers’ personally identifiable information (PII) and defraud the government, highlighting the use of sophisticated malware and fraudulent accounts to move the funds.
“Akande and his coconspirators filed more than 1,000 fraudulent tax returns seeking over $8.1 million in refunds. They successfully obtained over $1.3 million in fraudulent tax refunds,” the official statement said.
Judge Talwani’s ruling marks the conclusion of a multi-year investigation into Akande’s cyber fraud activities and signals continued U.S. efforts to prosecute international cybercrime.
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