Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, March 17, 1995 TAG: 9503170044
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: LAURENCE HAMMACK STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
By the time police caught up with two men suspected of bank fraud, they were relaxing in the bar at Roanoke Regional Airport, waiting for a flight back to New York.
A plastic shopping bag sitting on the bar next to them held $4,850 in cash, and one of the men later was found to be carrying another $8,012. Also found in the bag was a brochure from First Union bank, on which someone had made check marks next to several branch offices that were listed by address.
According to testimony Thursday in Roanoke Circuit Court, the two men flew into Roanoke last Nov. 15, caught a taxi at the airport and went to seven banks, using stolen and counterfeit credit cards to withdraw at least $12,000 in cash advances in just a few hours.
After hearing the evidence, Judge Robert P. Doherty accepted a plea agreement in which Bamikole Laniyan and Sahid T. Ewumi admitted their roles in the scam. Each man was convicted of nine charges that included credit-card theft, credit-card fraud and forgery.
"It was a very sophisticated scheme," Chief Assistant Commonwealth's Attorney Betty Jo Anthony said.
Roanoke police say the crimes fit a trend - Nigerians coming to the United States to commit a variety of fraud schemes - that has become so widespread that the Secret Service has created a task force to combat the problem.
West Africans, most of them Nigerians, stole $380 million in various fraud schemes in 1983, the Secret Service said in a story published last year in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
Roanoke police have been in contact with the task force, Anthony said, and Secret Service agents had offered to testify that Laniyan's and Ewumi's crimes were similar to those uncovered by the probe.
Although both Laniyan and Ewumi are natives of Nigeria, their attorneys, Roanoke lawyer Paul Driscoll and Assistant Public Defender John Varney, said there has been no evidence to link their clients to any larger scheme being investigated by the Secret Service.
"To date, they haven't had anything to implicate my client," Driscoll said.
As it turned out, Anthony decided against using testimony from the Secret Service agents because prosecutors believed they had ample evidence to prove what happened in Roanoke, including photographs of the defendants taken by surveillance cameras in the banks.
After flying in from New York and catching a cab at the airport, Laniyan and Ewumi gave the driver a large tip before asking him to drive them to several banks on Orange Avenue, Anthony said. At the banks, the men used fake identification cards to match a stolen and a counterfeit credit card as they asked tellers for cash advances of up to $2,500.
From there, they went to the First Union office in downtown Roanoke to collect more cash, then to a bank branch office in Southeast Roanoke, and then to one on Grandin Road Southwest.
Their mistake was making a final stop at the First Union branch on Hershberger Road as they headed back to the airport. Authorities credit the teller who waited on them, Wanda Hartberger, for spotting the scam.
After becoming suspicious of the counterfeit card, Hartberger called the company to check it out. While the number was a legitimate one, it did not match the name on the card, she discovered.
By then, Laniyan and Ewumi were gone. But one of them left behind a New Jersey identification card, and police quickly decided to check out the airport. After Hartberger identified Laniyan at the airport's bar, the two men were arrested.
Potential jurors had been called to court Thursday for a two-day trial, but were allowed to leave after Laniyan and Ewumi decided at the last minute to accept plea agreements. They are scheduled to be sentenced May 25.
by CNB