Last updated on September 11th, 2021 at 03:14 pm
A Nigerian born-woman Temitope Ayoni Olaiya, a.k.a Tammy Olaiya, faces on 28 February, 2020 a mandatory minimum sentence of 10 years in prison over the importation of 7kg of cocaine into the United States.
The 40 year-old woman also faces sentencing for her role in a bank fraud scheme, and to making false statements relating to fraudulent claims submitted to Medicaid for reimbursement.
She pleaded guilty to all the offences.
U.S. District Judge Liam O’Grady accepted the plea. Assistant U.S. Attorney Katherine E. Rumbaugh is prosecuting the case, according to a statement by Department of Justice, U.S. Attorney’s Office, Eastern District of Virginia.
“Tammy Olaiya is a ‘triple threat’ of criminality – drug trafficker, a fraudster, and a liar,” said G. Zachary Terwilliger, U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia.
“Olaiya, a Nigerian immigrant who has spent the last two decades with the privilege of living in the United States as lawful permanent resident, clearly has zero respect for American laws pertaining to our borders, controlled substances, our financial system, or our health care system.”
According to court documents, Tammy residing in Hyattsville, Maryland, recruited men from the greater Washington, D.C. area to act as drug courier; i.e., to travel to foreign countries to obtain drugs to bring back into the United States.
Olaiya opened bank accounts in the couriers’ names, assisted them in obtaining passports and visas, and booked their travel arrangements. The couriers that Olaiya recruited traveled primarily to São Paulo, Brazil, where they picked up kilogram quantities of cocaine hidden in the lining of soft-sided briefcases or attaché cases. Altogether, law enforcement seized nearly seven kilograms of cocaine at three different U.S. airports from three separate couriers recruited by Olaiya.
In addition to the cocaine importation scheme, Olaiya also submitted falsified and fraudulent claims to the D.C. Department of Health Care Finance (DHCF), a health care benefit program funded by Medicaid.
Olaiya worked as a personal care aide for various home health agencies in the Washington D.C. area, and in order to receive payment for services rendered, Olaiya was required to submit timesheets signed by her clients documenting the services rendered. Instead of submitting time sheets for time actually worked providing health care services, Olaiya recruited Medicaid recipients to act as her “patients” and to sign her falsified timesheets in return for a small amount of money as a kickback. On at least two occasions, Olaiya billed DHCF for home health services she claimed to have provided while she was out of the country.
Olaiya also used her African goods business, FINEST FASSHIONS AFRICAN FABRICS at 7429 Annapolis Road, Hyaatsville in Maryland to carry out a bank fraud. Olaiya used accounts with payment platforms Square and Stripe to make fraudulent charges on stolen credit card numbers. Between June and December 2017, Olaiya submitted, or caused to be submitted, $381,500 in fraudulent credit card charges to the Stripe account.
Thereafter, Olaiya switched over to Square, and in the course of about two months, racked up more than $100,000 in fraudulent charges. When Square informed Olaiya that the true account holder had challenged the transaction, Olaiya created handwritten, falsified invoices documenting items purportedly purchased by the account holder, and provided the fake invoices to Square.
According to the US Attorney Office, Eastern District of Virginia, the case was prosecuted as part of Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force (OCDETF) Operation Girl From Ipanema.
The OCDETF program is a federal multi-agency, multi-jurisdictional task force that supplies supplemental federal funding to federal and state agencies involved in the identification, investigation, and prosecution of major drug trafficking organisations. The principal mission of the OCDETF program is to identify, disrupt, and dismantle the most serious drug trafficking, weapons trafficking, and money laundering organisations, and those primarily responsible for the nation’s illegal drug supply.
The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) Washington, D.C., and the Medicaid Fraud Control Unit of the DC Office of Inspector General provided significant assistance with the investigation.
