A 42-year-old man from Nigeria was sentenced Monday in U.S. District Court in Tacoma to five years in prison for a $3.5 million romance scam that targeted eight victims, many of whom were divorced or widowed older adults.
Franklin Ikechukwu Nwadialo was arrested at a Texas airport in 2024 while traveling from Nigeria. He had been indicted in the Western District of Washington in December 2023 for 14 counts of wire fraud associated with the multimillion dollar romance scam. The FBI began investigating the case in 2022 after a victim reached out to the agency to report a romance scam, FBI Seattle spokesperson Amy Alexander said in an email.
For 15 years, Nwadialo met victims on online dating platforms, including Match, Zoosk and Christian Cafe, a Department of Justice news release said. Nwadialo adopted false identities and versions of the name “Giovanni” to manipulate victims into transferring money into his accounts, sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars at a time.
Nwadialo developed relationships with his victims and crafted stories to gain victims’ trust and ask for financial help. He told one victim he was in the military and needed her support to pay a $150,000 fine for disclosing his location to her. He told other victims he needed help paying for his father’s funeral, his son’s school tuition or a nonprofit he ran that served autistic children.
“This defendant preyed on those already suffering from the loss of loved ones or other heartbreak. For some 15 years he upended the lives of people he never met,” said First Assistant U.S. Attorney Neil Floyd in the news release.
