(File Photo of the United States Department of Justice Logo)

Noah Haswell, Beaver County Radio News

(Pittsburgh, PA) According to Acting United States Attorney Troy Revetti, a man has been charged with wire fraud and computer fraud for allegedly stealing over $235,000 from a university in Western Pennsylvania. Following a United States request for extradition, United Kingdom authorities arrested Farouk Adekunle Adepoju on Monday, who is a Nigerian citizen residing in the United Kingdom. According to the indictment, Adepoju allegedly accessed a protected computer belonging to a construction company working for the university. Adepoju also created change of rules through that access that was unauthorized within the email account of an employee of that university and registered a domain that was spoofed to make himself as the identity of another employee. Adepoju sent emails that were fraudulent to university employees, requesting updates to the construction company’s payment information to a bank account that was fraudulent from the spoofed email account. The university sent a payment of approximately $235,266.80 to the fraudulent account, which has not been recovered and that university was relying on those emails. Adepoju is waiting for extradition to the United States before going to the Western District of Pennsylvania, where he will face a seven-count indictment. The charges for Adepoju are one count of computer fraud and six counts of wire fraud. Up to twenty years in prison is the maximum sentence for each wire fraud offense and up to five years in prison is could be possibly faced for the computer offense fraud for Adepoju’s alleged offenses.