Georgia Man Stephen Odiboh Sentenced to 33 Months for Romance Scam That Cost Four Victims $356,500
The U.S. Attorney's Office for the Western District of New York announced that Stephen Odiboh, 53, of Stone Mountain, Georgia, was sentenced by U.S. District Judge Charles J. Siragusa to 33 months in prison and ordered to pay $196,500 in restitution after being convicted of conspiracy to commit wire fraud. Prosecutors said that from 2023 through March 2025, Odiboh used fake online personas to defraud four victims, whose actual and attempted losses totaled $356,500.
The first victim, a 77-year-old woman in the Western District of New York, met a man calling himself "Oliver Wilson" on Facebook in 2023. Posing as a widowed U.S. citizen living in Norway, he built an online romance lasting about a year and a half. She sent roughly 30 gift cards of $500 each, about $15,000, so he could "stay online," and from January to July 2024 she mailed eight checks totaling more than $162,000, two of them payable to Odiboh. In December 2024 she was told Wilson had been detained by Norwegian customs and needed a $158,000 fine paid; her bank stopped the checks.
A second victim, a caterer, received a fake $2,800 catering-deposit check in April 2024 from "Alex Alberto," who asked her to Zelle back $2,000; she spotted the fraud and never deposited it. A third victim, who met "William Rivera" on a dating site, sent Odiboh $2,000 by CashApp on August 14, 2024. A fourth, who met "Alec Jonas" in March 2025 and was told he worked in Bahrain, wired $17,525 to ship goods to Texas.
The case was investigated by the FBI and IRS Criminal Investigation and prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorney Meghan K. McGuire; U.S. Attorney Michael DiGiacomo announced the sentence. Officials warn that an online romantic partner who asks for gift cards or wire transfers is showing a classic sign of romance fraud.
Source: GSM · USA (original Chinese edition)
Photo: 图：位于纽约州罗切斯特的联邦大楼（Wikimedia Commons，Bmzuckerman 摄，CC BY 4.0） / Photo: The federal building in Rochester, New York (Wikimedia Commons, by Bmzuckerman, CC BY 4.0)
