Extradited Nigerian National Pleads Guilty to Money Laundering in Connection with Sextortion and Romance Scams

Olamide Shanu, a 35-year-old Nigerian national, pleaded guilty on September 21, 2026, in the District of Idaho to charges related to his role in multiple cyber-enabled schemes that defrauded approximately 150 American victims and caused millions of dollars in losses. Shanu made more than 2.5 million dollars from the fraud schemes, which included sextortion and romance scams. The conviction forms part of the Criminal Division's Cyber-Enabled Scam Initiative, reflecting intensified federal efforts to prosecute individuals involved in transnational cyber-exploitation schemes targeting U.S. victims.

Prosecutions secure accountability after victims have already transferred money, complied with demands, or suffered psychological harm. Guardii anti-sextortion detection identifies the demand for payment, the threat to expose explicit material and the coercive language in real time as the conversation occurs, stopping the exchange before a child sends funds or additional images and surfacing the contact to the adult or authority who can intervene. Sextortion monetisation depends on the victim's belief that compliance will end the threat; real-time detection at the message level breaks that cycle at first contact, flagging escalation across Instagram, Snapchat, Discord, Roblox and other platforms, and enabling emergency referral where the threat indicates imminent harm. As a world-leading AI online-safety platform backed by Startmate, Guardii operates alongside law enforcement, detecting the shape and seriousness of a conversation rather than reading every message, with detection modules that address grooming, child sexual abuse material, cyberbullying and other forms of exploitation before harm occurs.