The biography and exploits of a Canadian based Nigerian Identity thief: The Playboy of Yorkville - Adekunle Johnson Omitiran aka Johnson Chrome
14:45
A bit long but a very interesting and detailed article about a
Canadian based Nigerian fraudster, shared on Toronto Life by Micheal
Johnston. Read below.
Johnson Chrome was born Adekunle Johnson Omitiran on January 31,
1980, in the Oshodi slums of Lagos, Nigeria. His father, Gbadebo, was a
travelling businessman from southwestern Nigeria. When Chrome was a boy,
Gbadebo left Chrome’s mother, a Fulani woman from Nigeria’s north, and
at one point allegedly had as many as six wives. Gbadebo studied at the
University of Exeter in the U.K. and later found his way to Toronto.
Chrome’s mother was left to raise him and his brother and stepbrother,
with the help of her father, who took the family in. Chrome didn’t
respond to interview requests for this story, but sources in Nigeria say
he spent much of his childhood on the streets, getting shooed away from
the local markets by vendors, who didn’t want a poor kid hanging
around. According to one childhood friend, he wasn’t a troublemaker and
had no criminal record. He later attended Lagos State University, and in
2003, when he was 23, his father brought him to Toronto.
Chrome enrolled at York University, where he studied economics and
lived modestly in a basement apartment near campus. Less than a year
later, police believe, he entered the world of fraud. In January 2004,
Canada customs intercepted a suspicious parcel destined for Chrome’s
apartment. The package had come from Nigeria, and it was heavy enough to
qualify for inspection. Inside, officials discovered 36 envelopes
addressed to various people in the U.S., each containing a counterfeit
cheque for roughly $10,000. The intended recipients had placed ads
online selling various items; fraudsters, posing as brokers, wrote
letters explaining they wanted to buy the item, but their buyers had
already written a cheque for more than the asking price. Would the
recipient be so kind as to deposit it and wire back the difference? In
most instances of the scam, the intended target is skeptical and ignores
the letter, but inevitably, some obey the enclosed instructions. By the
time the bank catches on and cancels the transaction, the account
holder is on the hook and the scammer is in the wind, a few thousand
dollars richer. These kinds of frauds are so popular in Nigeria that
they’re now known globally as 419 scams, which refers to the section of
Nigeria’s criminal code pertaining to fraud. Police claim that Chrome’s
job was to mail the letters from Canada, bypassing the suspicions of
U.S. Postal Service officials.
Toronto police set up a fake FedEx delivery to Chrome’s address. When
he signed for the parcel, they arrested him and charged him with
defrauding the public. Ultimately, however, the Crown decided they would
be hard pressed to prove that Chrome was aware of the parcel’s
contents, and the charges were withdrawn.
Chrome reappeared on police radar in 2006, when he walked into a
Royal Bank on Bathurst and, using forged documents under the name Glen
Lee, opened a chequing account. RBC eventually realized that the account
was fishy, and police arrested Chrome. He pleaded guilty to fraud under
$5,000 and received a 12-month conditional discharge, which effectively
wiped his record clean after the sentence was over. By 2007, he’d
obtained Canadian citizenship.
According to police, Chrome also developed another elaborate, highly
profitable scheme, one that encompassed mail theft, identity theft and
credit card fraud. First, they allege, he would intercept mail at condos
in Toronto, typically buildings without concierges or front desk staff.
He’d enter the mailroom with a set of bump keys and try locks until one
popped open, then repeat the process, scooping up as much mail as he
could carry. Later, he’d open the mail, find bank documents, and record
the target’s name, address and financial information in a notebook. He
would call the banks and impersonate the cardholder, trying to extract
additional information, and update each profile in his notebook as he
went. As he honed his scheme, he’d learn his victims’ dates of birth,
phone numbers and email addresses. In many cases, he knew what car his
victims drove, where they worked, and the names of their loved ones.
With that information in hand, he’d call the bank’s customer service
number and, armed with enough intel to ace the security questions,
request a new card. A day or two later, he’d stake out the condo
building, wait for the mail carrier to make their drop, enter, and steal
the envelope containing the new card.
Next came the spending spree. Often, Chrome would withdraw cash at an
ATM or purchase prepaid gift cards. Chrome’s scam was
labour-intensive—hustling for a few thousand dollars at a time—but
therein lay its brilliance. Banks, though they won’t admit it, tend not
to waste their time chasing small sums, which they can quickly reverse.
It’s painstaking work for the police to chase down each reported fraud;
Crown prosecutors roll their eyes at the complicated paperwork; and
judges are often loath to dish out heavy penalties, since the crime is
non-violent and the ultimate victim is almost always the banks, which
can write off their losses. Despite their best efforts, police say,
Chrome was able to continue his operation in plain sight—and no one
could do much about it.
Chrome’s girlfriend from Nigeria, Olubukola “Bukky” Jegede, soon
followed him to Canada. They married and eventually had three kids. By
all accounts, Chrome was a devoted father, taking his kids to the park,
the movies, and to church every Sunday. The family moved
often—presumably to keep police from knowing his whereabouts.
Somewhere along the way, Chrome began using his middle name, Johnson,
and sometimes went by Jay. As money began to flow in from his frauds,
he explained to some friends that he worked for a moving company. Chrome
also sent cash back home to set up a liquor store business for his
mother in the Oshodi area. He later built two houses in the residential
area of Abule Egba, in the north end of Lagos, and put his mother in one
of them.
He spent lavishly on himself, too. In April 2007, using stolen credit
cards, he dropped $5,000 on stereo equipment at Bang and Olufsen near
Bay and Bloor, and bought 10 pairs of designer shoes at Davids down the
street. When police raided his Lawrence West apartment, he ran to the
bathroom clutching his phone, which he tried to hide in the garbage can.
On it were photos of a residential construction project back in Lagos,
plus images of a shipping container housing a car, a flat-screen TV and
building materials—many of which are hard to come by in Nigeria. They
seized $140,000 of personal property, including clothing, watches and
jewellery, plus five TVs, a washing machine and $17,000 in cash. But
they didn’t find the evidentiary treasure trove they were looking for:
the notebooks, credit cards, receipts and stolen mail that they hoped
would convince a judge of the mammoth scope of Chrome’s operation. They
began to suspect he kept a stash house for the most damning material.
They eventually found enough evidence from ATM security footage to
lay 53 charges. Chrome pleaded guilty to a handful of charges in
exchange for getting the others withdrawn, and he got off with two
concurrent sentences of six months’ house arrest, once again avoiding
significant jail time. And so began a game of cat and mouse between the
police and Johnson Chrome that would last nearly a decade.
In august 2007, Chrome and his wife bought a three-storey detached
house with a two-car garage in a sleepy Brampton subdivision for
$442,000. Later, according to police, he invested his funds into more
real estate, eventually putting a down payment on a $3.4-million
five-bedroom, custom-built McMansion with a three-car garage, backing
onto a golf course in a tony section of Kleinburg.
Chrome used the spoils of his crimes to put a down payment on this
$3.4-million McMansion in Kleinburg. Photograph by Daniel Neuhaus
Like any successful businessman, Chrome learned to delegate. Police say
he teamed up with a fellow Nigerian named Mickie Noah, who would
allegedly make ATM withdrawals and request new cards and PIN changes as
part of Chrome’s operation. Noah had grown up in even poorer
circumstances than Chrome, and over time he’d developed a similar
appetite for luxury. He mocked Torontonians’ lack of sartorial
derring-do. “Downtown, they think they’re stylish, but they all wear
black,” he once posted on Instagram. Noah had a predilection for bright
jackets, wide-brimmed hats and oversized Iris Apfel glasses. He shopped
at Holt Renfrew and Via Cavour, stocking his closet with monk-strap
shoes, vibrant ascots and jaunty bow ties. He also shared Chrome’s
fondness for cigars—Cohiba robustos were his particular weakness—which
he often enjoyed next to his friend on Yorkville’s best-situated bench.
Chrome gradually aligned himself with other associates. Andrew
Afolarin was a confidence man, smooth on the phone and able to
sweet-talk anyone into just about anything. Afolarin liked to hire white
Torontonians as his subcontractors, believing they’d invite less
suspicion in the banks because of their skin colour. A man named Gee
Salaq was purported to be a specialist in account-takeover fraud,
especially against U.S. residents. Police suspect that over time, Chrome
also developed sources inside Canadian banks, who would provide
cardholder information in exchange for a kickback.
In March 2008, Chrome went to the Bay and bought $586 worth of
fragrances using a fraudulently obtained TD Visa. He also used stolen
credit cards to buy a $355 belt, a $6,500 Omega Deville Co-Axial watch, a
pair of $820 sneakers and $610 Louis Vuitton driving shoes. In
September 2008, he pleaded guilty to three more charges of fraud under
$5,000 and received a conditional sentence of 12 months, which again
meant no jail time beyond the minimal time served. He later applied to
have his bail altered so that he could fly home to Nigeria twice, to
attend his grandfather’s funeral and later to deal with the estate. The
judge allowed it.
Two years later, in August 2010, police believe that Chrome tried to
purchase $21,000 worth of furniture from Martin Daniels Interiors using a
stolen Mastercard, plus $8,200 in ceramic tiles, perhaps for his
housing project back in Lagos. Once again, they raided his home. Along
with the usual plunder of watches and suits, they found mailbox keys for
a building on Rathburn Road in Mississauga, and lists of various
tenants of that building, plus their financial information.
It was the smoking gun they hoped would make charges against Chrome
stick. Over the course of their investigation, police compiled evidence
suggesting that Chrome had compromised 162 bank accounts, allegedly
dinging BMO for $274,000 and CIBC for $82,000. The resulting charges
fell under several court jurisdictions across the GTA. One major count
related to York Region, so the file was sent there and was misplaced.
When it was recovered and sent back to Toronto, where the bulk of the
alleged frauds had taken place, the case had been pending for so long
that the courts stayed the matter. Again, Chrome was spared significant
jail time.
By the time Trotter and Kelly, of the Toronto fraud squad, held their
bankers’ synod in 2016, Chrome had become a mythical figure in the
financial industry, a kind of perverted folk hero who stole from the
middle class and spent it on himself. Trotter and Kelly told the bankers
that if police were going to solve their fraud problem, they’d need
help. They wanted to determine if Mr. O really was as prolific a
fraudster as the bankers assumed. They operated under the assumption
that he wasn’t involved at all, then set out to determine whether these
instances of fraud were in fact linked. They called their investigation
Project Royal, and recruited help from the York Regional Police, the
Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre, the Canadian Border Services Agency, Canada
Post, and the Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of
Canada. They told the assembled bankers that they needed images of
people making withdrawals using fraudulently obtained cards. They asked
for dates, amounts, times of transactions and records of phone calls
made requesting PIN changes.
A few days later, they caught a break. Representatives from a bank in
the Niagara region got in touch with video images from an ATM camera of
a Nigerian man in his 40s, later identified as Adedayo Ogundana, making
cash withdrawals using a stolen credit card. On one date he wore a grey
hat with a black brim. On another, he wore the same hat and a hoodie
with “NBA” written on it. And on another date, he wore a green Pharrell
hat. He’d been charged before, which enabled police to obtain a search
warrant on his North York condo; they raided it on December 13, 2016.
Ogundana wasn’t home—he was out purchasing prepaid gift cards at the
time—but inside his condo and car, police found a collection of credit
card numbers scribbled on small scraps of paper. They also found the
hats and clothing Ogundana had worn in the bank’s surveillance footage.
When Ogundana finally returned home, police arrested him and obtained a
search warrant for his cellphones.
On Ogundana’s phone, police came across an intriguing lead: short
text messages from someone listed as “Jay,” containing what appeared to
be random names and associated credit card numbers. Police thought that
Jay could be Johnson Chrome, and they received judicial authorization to
view the records for his number. Soon, they’d established his daily
routine: he’d start the day in Yorkville, head northwest of the city
until the early afternoon, stop in at the same area of North York where
his wife and kids were living, and then return to Yorkville.
Police appealed to fraudsters they knew for more information about
identity theft networks in Toronto. Criminals typically don’t rat on
each other, but in this case, there was no such omertà. Flashiness only
invites police attention, and Chrome and his buddies were daring the
police to sniff around. Trotter and Kelly followed the trail, combing
through their social media accounts, which were teeming with photos of
lavish dinners, fancy clothing, expensive cigars and luxury vehicles.
And nowhere was there any evidence of any sort of employment. Even
better, the accounts helped Trotter and Kelly piece together the group’s
social relationships—without having to sit in a car with a telephoto
lens.
A few members of the public divulged crucial leads, including the
fact that Chrome kept a condo in a high-rise near the Hazelton Hotel.
Trotter and Kelly canvassed the area, asking retailers about Chrome;
most people remained tight-lipped. Still, tips kept trickling in, and
police soon learned that Chrome drove a black Jaguar. They tracked down
his unit number, then applied for a search warrant.
On April 24, 2017, Trotter, Kelly and four other cops, all of them in
plainclothes, set up outside 155 Yorkville Avenue, the former Four
Seasons. It was a straightforward stakeout, but something was off. There
were a number of people hanging around, not doing anything exactly, and
trading glances with the police. Trotter and Kelly called various
agencies to check if there was anyone else on the case. There wasn’t.
Then they sent one of their plainclothes officers to sit down beside one
suspicious-looking woman and strike up a conversation. Within minutes,
she explained her plan to marry Justin Bieber. It all clicked: Bieber
was staying in town, and the people hanging around were paparazzi and
wild-eyed autograph hunters.
Eventually, police spotted Chrome walking toward them. With so many
Beliebers in the vicinity, Trotter didn’t want to cause a scene.
Instead, he quietly approached and whispered his real name, “ ’Kunle.”
Chrome turned, said “Yeah?” then made eye contact with Trotter and
bolted. Trotter gave chase. Someone was unloading produce from a parked
truck onto a cart; as Chrome ran past it he toppled the cart into
Trotter’s path, spilling fruit and eggs across the sidewalk. Trotter
hopped over the mess, but got tangled up in a bicycle and wiped out. Two
other officers ran after Chrome, but he got away. Another officer
stayed with the car while Trotter and Kelly entered the suspect’s
apartment.
Chrome’s 600-square-foot condo was spartan, with a stunning view to
the southeast. According to police, the moon dust watch, a few credit
cards and two cellphones were on the counter. In the bedroom was an open
safe, containing $39,200 in cash. They lifted up the mattress to reveal
his massive footwear collection. Two closets were filled with bespoke
suit jackets, watches, dress shirts, cologne and sunglasses. There were
four bottles of moisturizer worth a total of $2,000. They found
paperwork that they knew would help refute a defence lawyer’s argument
that Chrome didn’t live in the condo. In the closet drawers was the
evidentiary jackpot: 37 credit cards not in his name, rows and rows of
stolen mail from more than 20 buildings in the GTA, plus 16 notebooks
containing the names and addresses of some 5,000 GTA residents,
including a widow named Doreen Affleck and an accountant named Wayne
Haymer. Finally, they’d found the stash house.
Johnson Chrome was on the run. The next day, he called a friend who
worked as a bespoke men’s clothier in the Yorkville area. They’d met
years earlier at the old Four Seasons bar, and Chrome trusted him.
Chrome’s friend had made clothing for the Toronto lawyer Peter Brauti
and suggested Chrome speak to him. Brauti eventually convinced Chrome to
turn himself in. On April 27, Brauti called the police and said, “I
think I have a guy you’re looking for.”
Police had learned their lesson: fraud doesn’t get the court’s
attention. So they gave it a spotlight. On May 9, 2017, Trotter and
Kelly held a press conference announcing the details of Project Royal.
They arranged a dazzling showcase of Chrome’s shoes, watches and
cologne, plus a healthy stockpile of wine and liquor. They brought in
racks to display his suit jackets. Trotter and Kelly spoke to the media
at length about Chrome’s alleged activities, spelling out the broad
nature of the crimes. They had prepared a slide show of his associates,
emphasizing the claim that this was not a lone wolf operation but
instead a major syndicate perpetrating fraud on a massive scale. Though
none of the allegations have been proven in court, police have laid 14
charges against Chrome and another 14 against Ogundana. A warrant has
been issued for Noah and Salaq, but they’re on the run, probably in the
U.S.
The day of the press conference, Project Royal was a lead item on the
evening broadcasts. The news even resonated back home in Nigeria. The
overwhelming reaction among Nigerians I spoke to was anger and
frustration at another native son going abroad and falling into a life
of fraud. At the same time, there’s a faction within Nigeria that’s
proud. They see fraud perpetrated on Westerners as payback for the years
of colonial rule that laid waste to their country, infecting it with
corruption and widespread dysfunction.
Later that month, a judge granted Chrome bail with a series of
conditions, one of which was that he not possess a cellphone, since it
was his alleged business tool. Six weeks later, in late June, Chrome
walked into an appliance store in Vaughan clutching a cellphone. Using a
credit card, he had purchased $60,000 in appliances, presumably for his
custom home in Kleinburg. Chrome asked the sales clerk for a refund on
his deposit in cash, which raised the clerk’s suspicions. Two days
later, police confronted Chrome, who was standing beside a U-Haul truck,
talking on his phone. One officer approached from the front; Chrome saw
him and turned to run, but encountered another officer who’d approached
from the rear. His only words: “Oh, shit.”
Chrome was placed in jail for violating his bail conditions, though
he could be let out again before his case goes to trial, which will
likely take place in 2018. According to police, the Crown’s case is
strong: they have evidence of Chrome’s broad network and his criminal
proceeds, plus an epic history of failure to respect the court’s orders.
Recently, there have been a few fraud cases where the accused receives a
penitentiary sentence, which means at least two years. But the Crown is
fighting gravity: many of Ontario’s prisons are already overpopulated,
and there’s a limited desire to add non-violent criminals to the mix.
It’s possible, even likely, that Chrome will escape serious punishment
once again.
TheNEWS BERG (Formerly Kevin Djakpor Blog) is the leading go-to sites for Breaking Political, celebrity and general news garnering millions ofpage views a month and rising rapidly.
Kevin Jakpor (CEO & Chief Editor) is the passionate and professional blogger, the founder and owner of NEWSBERG. Take a moment to click right through to his blog. It has tons of great posts on news, entertainment, culture, music, money, sports and many other fascinating areas of social life.
0 Comments