Steyn City ‘tech entrepreneur’ jailed for fraud

● To Steyn City residents, Martins Egenamba was living the life of a young and successful tech entrepreneur, driving a Ford Mustang and brainstorming new business ideas with an unsuspecting neighbour.

In fact, the Nigerian businessman was the mastermind behind a sophisticated scheme raking in millions of dollars from victims in the US and South Africa through business e-mail compromise (BEC) fraud, a form of cybercrime.

Investigators from the Hawks, with the help of the South African Cyber Fraud Task Team, managed to track the theft of about R16m ($862,200) from victims in the US and South Africa. Local authorities were alerted to Egenamba’s involvement by authorities in the US, where a string of suspects are on trial in connection with the same scheme.

The money was stolen in three BEC scams in which US-based companies’ invoices were intercepted between September 2020 and February 2021. The fraudsters changed the bank account details on these invoices to accounts controlled by them. The money would eventually be sent from the US to an FNB account belonging to Egenamba’s South African company Barlon d’Or Group.

Egenamba was convicted of fraud in the Palm Ridge magistrate’s court and sentenced to 15 years in jail for his dealings in the local arm of the international fraud scheme.

In a separate ongoing investigation, Egenamba is believed to have been involved in another fraud scheme in Johannesburg in which he netted an estimated R6m, according to the cyber fraud task team. The Asset Forfeiture Unit has secured an order against him in connection with the matter.

This week, his former next-door neighbour in The Village apartment complex in the Steyn City estate in northern Johannesburg — where apartments cost between R2.6m and R35m — reacted with shock on hearing of Egenamba’s conviction.

The neighbour, who asked not to be identified, said it was fortuitous for him that Egenamba was arrested in 2021, just as the two started becoming involved in business together.

“He was opening and starting companies a lot. I think he was trying to actually have some type of legitimate businesses. When we would talk he would always try to brainstorm starting more businesses,” the neighbour said.

Egenamba approached the neighbour to help him set up an IT business. One of his many “sporadic” ideas was to develop an app to manage domestic workers.

“At one time he wanted to open a nightclub. I think he was sitting on a sizeable amount of capital. The business we were involved in was some kind of IT business where he wanted to develop apps, and he approached me to help him develop the IT infrastructure,” he said. “Before we had actually got the thing going, they came and took him away.”

The neighbour said he became hesitant to take their business relationship further because Egenamba lacked focus. “He was the type of guy who had a business plan every other week, so you couldn’t really keep up,” he said. “We never actually put money into the business, thankfully, but if they had arrested him a few months later, we probably would have.”

The neighbour said Egenamba’s imprisonment meant his wife and two children are now left to fend for themselves.

Egenamba had a voracious appetite for luxury vehicles. He was apparently especially fond of a 5l Ford Mustang with a personalised number plate — N3rd GP — and investigators found many pictures of it on his phone. The state pursued most of his possessions, including the Mustang, an erf in Steyn City and millions of rand in his bank and trust accounts. In March last year, the Johannesburg high court granted a preservation order for R1.152m held in Egenamba’s trust account and for his Mustang to be sold at auction.

A separate high court order in June 2021 granted the national director of public prosecutions an order to seize R6m from Egenamba, another Nigerian and a South African, along with money held in three separate businesses — the result of the Johannesburg fraud scheme.

According to an affidavit deposed by Ultrich Kruger, a member of the South African Cyber Fraud Task Team who investigated the case against Egenamba relating to the fraud committed in the US, he was also involved in the fraud scheme in Johannesburg in which R20m is believed to have been stolen from his victims.

Kruger describes BEC fraud as “a form of cybercrime which uses e-mail fraud to attack commercial, government and non-profit organisations to achieve a specific outcome that negatively impacts the target organisation”.

One of the US victims, according to a victim impact statement, is a career nurse who lost her life savings of R7m ($370,000).