A 41-year-old Ghanaian
man was sentenced to 85 months in prison by a federal court in the United
States for his involvement in a large cybercrime conspiracy. After entering a
guilty plea to a charge of conspiracy to conduct wire fraud, Derrick Van Yeboah,
popularly known as "Van," was sentenced.
He was identified by
prosecutors as one of the key figures in the Ghana-based network that used
business email breach and romance scams to steal over $100 million.
The syndicate created
fictitious online romantic relationships or pretended to be business executives
in order to target vulnerable victims, many of whom were elderly. Yeboah was
deemed personally responsible for pressuring victims to transfer over $10 million
into accounts under the criminal organization's control.
He deceived ladies in
Ohio and Delaware into sending over $4.2 million between 2019 and 2020 by using
fictitious names. Additionally, he used phony claims about a parent's funeral
and trapped gold to con another victim in North Carolina out of $123,000.
Yeboah faced punishment
in New York after being extradited from Ghana in August 2025 via a coordinated
international effort. The court ordered him to serve two years of supervised
release and forfeit more than $10 million in addition to his prison sentence.
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