Chukwuemeka Victor Amachukwu, a 40-year-old Nigerian national, has been sentenced to eight years in prison for hacking tax preparation businesses across the United States and using the stolen data to file fraudulent returns seeking about $8.4 million in refunds. Prosecutors in the Southern District of New York say the scheme paid out about $2.5 million of that total before it was stopped. The Justice Department announced the sentence in a release dated Oct. 19, 2026.
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Spearphishing aimed at tax preparers in New York and Texas
According to the U.S. Attorney’s Office release, the conspiracy began around 2019. Amachukwu and Nigeria-based co-conspirators sent spearphishing emails to tax preparation firms, mainly in New York and Texas but also in other states, and used them to gain access to the firms’ computers. Once inside, they copied tax and identifying information belonging to about 800 of those firms’ customers. BleepingComputer’s account of the sentencing describes the same pattern, in which the preparer’s office is the target and the taxpayers whose files sit on its machines become the victims.
Investigators from the FBI built the case, and the Complex Frauds and Cybercrime Unit prosecuted it, with Assistant U.S. Attorney Daniel G. Nessim in charge.
U.S. Attorney Jamie McDonald said Amachukwu “believed he was operating safely offshore when he targeted his victims.” That belief ended when France extradited him. The earlier BleepingComputer report on the extradition states that he arrived in the United States on Aug. 4, 2025, and appeared the next day before U.S. Magistrate Judge Robert W. Lehrburger, roughly fourteen months before the sentence was announced.
$8.4 million sought, about $2.5 million obtained
The refund fraud was the tax-season core of the operation. The conspirators used the stolen identities of thousands of people to file false returns with the Internal Revenue Service and with state tax authorities. In total they sought about $8.4 million in refunds. They obtained about $2.5 million, according to the Justice Department. The gap between the two figures matters when reading the case: the $8.4 million is the amount claimed on the fraudulent returns, not the amount lost, and roughly $5.9 million of the claims did not pay out.
The same stolen identities were put to a second use. The conspirators filed fraudulent claims with the Small Business Administration’s Economic Injury Disaster Loan program, which was set up to give small businesses emergency working capital, and obtained about $819,000. Identity data harvested from tax preparers thus served as raw material for more than one kind of theft, which is one reason a single breach of a preparer’s systems can touch several federal and state programs at once, each with its own review process and its own chance to catch the fraud.
A fake letter-of-credit investment scheme worth more than $7 million
The hacking was only part of the conduct Amachukwu answered for. Prosecutors say he also offered investments in purportedly valuable standby letters of credit to victims in the United States while impersonating a wealthy overseas financier. The investments did not exist. That scheme netted more than $7 million, a larger haul than the tax refunds and loans combined, and it relied on persuasion rather than intrusion.
The sentence and the refund figure therefore describe different slices of the case. The $8.4 million relates only to the tax returns. The restitution order, which covers losses the court tied to Amachukwu’s offenses, is a separate number discussed below, and the investment fraud is counted on its own line in the release. Readers comparing the BleepingComputer headline total of about $3.3 million with the $8.4 million should note that the latter is what was sought, while the article’s own text says more than $3 million was stolen through the tax and loan schemes.
Eight years, restitution and forfeiture
U.S. District Judge Paul G. Gardephe imposed a sentence of eight years in prison followed by one year of supervised release. Amachukwu had pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit computer intrusions and conspiracy to commit wire fraud. The judge also ordered restitution of $3,647,629.39 and forfeiture of $10,846,634.39, figures drawn from the release and the court documents it links. The Justice Department release does not state the sentencing date or the date of the guilty plea, so the Oct. 19 release date is the firmest timing on record.
BleepingComputer identified a co-defendant, Kingsley Uchelue Utulu, and said other Nigeria-based conspirators were involved; the Justice Department release spells the first name “Kinglsey” and does not describe a sentence for him or for the unnamed others. For the roughly 800 customers whose files were taken, the $3.6 million restitution figure is the court’s measure of what the schemes cost victims, and it is far smaller than the forfeiture the government secured.
What the record leaves open is how much of that restitution will ever reach the victims. The release gives the ordered amount but no payment schedule, and nothing in it says how much of the $10.8 million forfeiture has actually been seized.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
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