…as Ohio prosecutors detail a network that used AI deepfakes to fleece elderly Americans.
By Prince Ahenkorah
Frederick Kumi known to US prosecutors as Abu Trica and Emmanuel Kojo Baah Obeng was extradited to Ohio on 9 July, six months after his arrest in Accra. If convicted on charges of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and money laundering, the 31-year-old Ghanaian faces two decades in federal prison.
The scale is striking. Between April 2023 and November 2025, Kumi and co-defendant Daniel Yussif (alias Denteni or Slab) ran a syndicate that drained over $8m from elderly American widows and divorcees.
Their toolkit was a hybrid of old-school confidence tricks and new-tech deception: fake dating profiles, encrypted messaging, and AI-generated video personas to simulate romance, followed by fabricated tales of gold, diamonds, and investment windfalls.
Proceeds moved swiftly. The syndicate used money mules in Ghana and among the Ghanaian diaspora in the US, washing cash through fictitious businesses before repatriating it. The visible returns a mansion in Ghana, a Lamborghini, a Tesla Cybertruck, a Mercedes, and a BMW have since been seized.
The extradition reflects tightening US-Ghanaian law-enforcement co-operation. Accra’s Economic and Organised Crime Office, the Cyber Security Authority, and the police all worked with the FBI Cleveland Division and the DOJ’s Office of International Affairs to secure Kumi’s transfer.
This case sits within the Elder Justice Initiative, a 2017 federal statute designed to beef up prosecutorial muscle against financial exploitation of the elderly.
For Accra, the publicity is awkward. Ghana has come under sustained international pressure to curb its ‘sakawa’ internet-fraud underworld, which has become a reputational drag on West Africa’s second-largest economy.
Kumi’s haul and his lavish asset trail offers US law enforcement a high-profile trophy, but it also underscores how sophisticated the region’s cybercriminal networks have become. An indictment, of course, is not a conviction; Kumi is presumed innocent unless proved guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. The trial will test just how deep the US is willing to dig into the offshore laundering chains that keep these syndicates afloat.