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The U.S. Department of Justice has announced that it has filed and served a civil denaturalization complaint in the U.S. District Court in Baltimore, Maryland, against Nigerian-born Emmanuel Oluwatosin Kazeem, who allegedly orchestrated a vast identity theft and tax fraud scheme.
The DOJ disclosed this in a press release issued on Wednesday, March 18, 2026.
According to reports, Kazeem was convicted in 2017 on 19 counts, including mail fraud, wire fraud, aggravated identity theft, and conspiracy to commit mail and wire fraud. He was subsequently sentenced to 15 years in prison.
The press release further noted that his sentence was commuted in 2024 by then-President Joe Biden after he had served six years.
“The Trump Administration will not permit wrongdoers to retain the U.S. citizenship they were never entitled to in the first place,” said Assistant Attorney General Brett A. Shumate of the Justice Department’s Civil Division.
“U.S. citizenship is a privilege, and we will continue to ask courts to revoke a status obtained through fraud and deceit.”
The newly filed complaint alleges that Kazeem’s criminal activities—committed both before and after his naturalization—along with his alleged concealment of those crimes, made him ineligible to obtain U.S. citizenship lawfully.
It also claims that prior to the fraud scheme, Kazeem entered into a sham marriage to secure permanent residency and later married another woman, further disqualifying him from naturalization.
Court documents and evidence presented during his criminal trial show that in May 2013, a victim in Medford, Oregon, alerted the IRS after discovering that fraudulent federal and state tax returns had been filed using her family’s personal identifying information, including Social Security numbers and dates of birth.
An investigation by the IRS led to search warrants executed at residences in Illinois, Maryland, and Georgia, as well as multiple email and instant messaging accounts linked to Kazeem and his co-conspirators.
At a residence in Chicago, agents recovered about 150 prepaid debit cards and $50,000 in money orders. Additional searches in Maryland and Georgia uncovered more than 50 electronic devices, 40 money orders worth over $29,000, $14,000 in cash, and prepaid debit cards loaded with more than $12,000 in fraudulent tax refunds.
Authorities said the evidence identified Kazeem as the leader of the operation, which involved stolen personal data belonging to more than 259,000 victims.
Investigators found that he purchased over 91,000 identities from a Vietnamese hacker, sourced from the database of an Oregon-based company that conducted pre-employment and volunteer background checks. He then distributed the stolen identities to co-conspirators, who used them to file fraudulent tax returns between 2012 and 2015.
Kazeem also trained members of the network, including his younger brother, Michael Oluwasegun Kazeem, on how to use stolen data to obtain electronic filing PINs and bypass IRS security measures.
In total, the group obtained more than 19,500 E-File PINs and used them to access sensitive taxpayer records and file fraudulent returns.
The conspirators used prepaid debit cards tied to stolen identities to receive fraudulent tax refunds directly from the IRS.
Overall, Kazeem was linked to 10,139 fraudulent federal tax returns that sought more than $91 million in refunds, of which over $11.6 million was successfully obtained.
Funds from the scheme were withdrawn via debit cards, while at least 2,000 wire transfers totaling over $2.1 million were sent to Nigeria. More than 700 of those transfers, amounting to over $690,000, were directly traced to Kazeem.
Prosecutors said he used proceeds from the scheme to make a nearly $200,000 down payment on a newly built home and to purchase a $175,000 townhouse in Maryland. His average monthly credit card spending between 2012 and 2015 exceeded $8,300.
Kazeem also allegedly attempted to invest the illicit proceeds in a $6 million, four-star hotel project in Lagos, Nigeria.
In May 2015, he transferred ownership of the townhouse to his sister in Nigeria for $10 and added her to the deed of his Maryland home for the same amount. He was arrested the following day.
