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.
Igbe was indicted alongside Adesayo and Atlanta tech entrepreneur Kingsley Inegbedion in May 2024, but fled to Nigeria after federal agents invited him for questioning ahead of the indictment, according to a July 2024 report from the Peoples Gazette. It remains unclear whether authorities expect to extradite him.
Decades of Prison Time Possible
Each of Adesayo's two conspiracy counts carries up to 20 years in prison, and each of his 16 transactional money laundering counts carries up to 10 years, per federal sentencing statutes cited by the U.S. Attorney's Office. Because he committed offenses while on pretrial release, he also faces an additional consecutive sentence of up to 10 years under 18 U.S.C. § 3147. Adesayo is scheduled to be sentenced before Judge Cohen on November 20.
The case was investigated by the FBI, Homeland Security Investigations and the U.S. Secret Service, with assistance from law enforcement agencies in New Hampshire, Mississippi and New York.
A Wider Pattern in Metro Atlanta
Adesayo's conviction follows a string of similar cases moving through metro Atlanta courts. Hoodline previously covered a Marietta man sentenced to 25 years for running a romance scam and money laundering network that also relied on fake automotive business accounts to move victim funds overseas.
The scale of the losses reflects a national trend. Americans aged 60 and older reported $7.7 billion in cybercrime losses in 2025 — a nearly 60% jump from the year before — according to the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center. The Federal Trade Commission has reported that total fraud losses among adults 60 and older quadrupled from $600 million in 2020 to $2.4 billion in 2024, and that bank wire transfers — the method used to move victim money into Igbe's accounts — accounted for $832 million in reported senior losses in 2024 alone, an eightfold increase since 2020.
