A 41-year-old Ghanaian national was sentenced to 85 months in prison for stealing more than $10 million from mostly older, lonely and vulnerable victims via romance scams, the Justice Department said Tuesday. 

Derrick Van Yeboah was a longtime and high-ranking member of a criminal organization primarily based in Ghana linked to more than $100 million stolen from romance scams and business email compromises, officials said. Van Yeboah served as a “sakawa boy,” impersonating fake romantic partners and directly interacting with victims online from February 2015 to October 2024.

“Romance scammers do not simply steal money — they weaponize trust,” Jay Clayton, U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, said in a statement. 

Van Yeboah was arrested in Ghana in June 2025, acting on a request from the Justice Department, and extradited to the United States two months later. He pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud and agreed to forfeit $10.15 million in fraudulent proceeds as part of a plea agreement in March.

Authorities said they identified at least 20 of Van Yeboah’s victims, noting that some were deceived into sending their money to the criminal organization, creating companies and using those entities to unwittingly launder funds from other victims. 

Victims include a woman from Delaware who either sent or laundered $1.9 million, a woman from Ohio who sent or laundered $2.3 million and another woman who sent or laundered about $1 million. Van Yeboah also tricked a North Carolina man to send $123,000, claiming he needed a loan to pay for his mother’s funeral expenses and to remove imaginary gold and diamonds from storage in Italy, according to court records.

Officials said Van Yeboah received a substantial amount of money from his criminal acts. He told pretrial services his assets include a house worth $1.5 million and jewelry worth $515,000. When he was arrested, Ghanaian police found him in possession of two vehicles stolen from the United States and Canada.

“Victims lost large portions of their life savings, money they had counted on for retirement. They were emotionally devastated to learn that the personas they had been talking to every day, personas who claimed to be in love with them, were in fact frauds,” Clayton wrote in a pre-sentencing letter to the court. 

Van Yeboah’s conduct was cruel, and he fully understood the financial and emotional harm he was causing to his victims, he added. 

“Van Yeboah’s conduct was far from an aberration. Van Yeboah engaged in the fraud scheme for nine years. It wasn’t isolated conduct; it wasn’t a blip,” Clayton wrote. “Indeed, it appears to be the only real job Van Yeboah has ever had. Day after day, for years, he targeted vulnerable victims, lied to them, and stole from them.”

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Threat actors are selling investment scam templates created using the legitimate DCloud Uni-App toolkit.

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The FBI, along with Google and Lumen Technologies, took down a major cybercrime network based in China that was responsible for an estimated $1.9 billion in losses, officials said Friday. 

Outsider, which provided phishing kits and hosted infrastructure for cybercriminals since July 2023, facilitated a wave of phishing attacks against people and businesses in 55 countries, including the United States, the FBI said in a LinkedIn post.

The jointly coordinated effort dubbed “Operation Ghost Hook” netted the seizure of several domains of the group’s core admin servers, a Shopify storefront, roughly $100,000 from Outsider payment wallets and thousands of domains registered through U.S.-based providers, officials said.

The FBI said it also used an Outsider Telegram bot to access information on the cybercrime network’s customers.

“The criminals behind Outsider Enterprise built a business out of impersonating trusted brands to defraud hundreds of thousands of victims,” Brett Leatherman, assistant director of the FBI’s cyber division, said in a statement.

Authorities traced Outsider’s phishing domains to nearly 3.9 million stolen credit cards.

Google, one of the vendors impersonated by the phishing kits, described Outsider as a massive AI-powered operation. 

Outsider provided its phishing kit, which allowed cybercriminals to create fake sites and phishing campaigns to steal credit cards, bank account credentials and personal data, for a weekly subscription as low as $88 per week, the company said in a civil lawsuit it filed to dismantle the cybercrime network’s infrastructure. 

The China-based group behind the operation encouraged and provided step-by-step instructions for customers to use Gemini and other AI platforms to generate custom code for phishing lures and corresponding sites for illegitimate missed packages, overdue highway tolls, parking violations, issues with a brokerage account or wireless carrier rewards.

“The Outsider software allows scammers to request multiple types of verification from victims, including SMS, PIN, email and app verification,” Google wrote in the lawsuit filed in the U.S. District for the Southern District of New York. “This flexibility enables the enterprise to defeat various forms of authentication security.”

Google said it’s working with AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon to intercept the spam messages before they reach customers, but these types of phishing attacks are prevalent and have been spreading for years. 

Google is also pushing for legislative action, including a series of bills, to combat these scams, General Counsel Halimah DeLaine Prado wrote in a blog post.

“Litigation alone won’t end this,” she wrote. “As threats evolve, our laws must, too.”

Google said it doesn’t know the real names of the people or entities involved in Outsider, but said the operation is supported by multiple cybercrime groups providing different roles with overlapping infrastructure.

The FBI said the takedown was part of Operation Riptide, an ongoing campaign targeting cybercriminals and the infrastructure and financial networks they use to commit fraud.

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