An attempt to swindle $280,000 from Sen. Strom Thurmond’s former chief of staff led federal investigators to uncover an international wire fraud and money laundering scheme that netted the suspects more than $60 million, federal court records unveiled last week show.
When Robert Short, who now lives in Alexandria and declined to comment, went to log into his United States Senate Federal Credit Union account on Dec. 9, his password wouldn’t work, court records said. The next day he regained access, only to discover $280,000 had gone missing.
Just three days earlier, the credit union had received a call from someone impersonating Short who requested $280,000 be sent from his account to a Wachovia account, records said. The caller’s phone number appeared to match Short’s, but was actually changed using an online service.
A wire transfer authorization form was then e-mailed to [email protected], and returned with Short’s signature, which had been electronically copied from loan forms available on the Internet through Listsource, one of the largest online repositories of mortgage information. The cash, investigators later learned, was wired to Woori Bank of Korea.
The discovery led to a series of subpeonas, phone taps and searches, eventually exposing a group of 11 suspects who used personal information deposited on various Web sites to victimize dozens of financial institutions and their clients, court records show.
Cash obtained from well-funded home equity line of credit accounts was sent to Asia where it was laundered and returned to the suspects via Western Union, court records show. In one wire transfer, Mike Walters, who was arrested in July by Singapore police, allegedly sent nearly $60 million to Tobechi Onwuhara.
In some cases, the stolen cash was used to buy high-end cars in Texas, which were then shipped to Onwuhara’s car-dealing brother-in-law, Daniel Orjinta, in Nigeria. Among those cars was a 2008 Bentley intercepted by U.S. Customs on Aug. 30 that was being shipped from Houston to Orjinta in Nigeria.
