A Douglasville man was convicted on all 18 counts he faced for laundering more than $2.7 million stolen from victims of romance scams and other online fraud schemes, federal prosecutors announced. Babajide Adesayo, 41, moved the money through a transnational network over roughly 17 months, funneling stolen retirement savings toward accounts overseas to keep victims from ever getting it back, according to prosecutors.
A federal jury delivered the guilty verdict last Thursday following an eight-day trial before U.S. District Judge Mark H. Cohen in Atlanta, as reported by CBS News Atlanta. Adesayo was convicted of two counts of conspiracy to commit money laundering and 16 counts of transactional money laundering. In an announcement from the U.S. Department of Justice, U.S. Attorney Theodore S. Hertzberg described Adesayo as a key financial player in a complex network that siphoned elderly victims’ retirement savings overseas, primarily to China, Hong Kong and Nigeria, in order to make financial recovery impossible.
How Victims Were Targeted
Online fraudsters communicated with victims between April 2020 and September 2021, prosecutors said, posing as friends, business associates or romantic partners before asking for money using false stories about business equipment, imprisonment, injuries or illnesses. Victims — many of them older adults who lost their retirement savings — sent hundreds of thousands of dollars to business accounts belonging to Adesayo’s co-defendant, Efemena Igbe. Other victims sent money directly to Adesayo’s own business accounts, or through additional accounts that eventually transferred funds to him, according to the same DOJ account.
Igbe, a Nigerian national, transferred much of the victims’ money to Adesayo and disguised the transactions as payments for vehicles from Adesayo’s automotive business, per prosecutors. Georgia Secretary of State corporate records show Igbe registered a company called Camtech Auto World LLC in Austell in August 2018 — an entity federal investigators say operated without any physical premises or legitimate revenue and existed solely to receive victim bank wires. The LLC was administratively dissolved in October 2022, per the state’s Corporations Division. Once funds landed in the network’s accounts, Adesayo withdrew or transferred additional funds shortly after receiving them, according to authorities, before sending much of the money onward to accounts in China, Hong Kong, Nigeria and other countries.
Laundering Continued Even After Indictment
Adesayo was arrested in June 2024 and was initially released on bond, but prosecutors say the money laundering continued while his case was pending. Federal court filings reviewed by PacerMonitor show that federal prosecutors successfully petitioned to revoke that bond under 18 U.S.C. § 3148(b) after discovering the ongoing activity, and a federal magistrate judge ordered Adesayo remanded to custody. He has remained in federal custody since March 2, 2026…