Ghanaian national sentenced to 7 years in prison for stealing $10M from romance scam victims

Derrick Van Yeboah impersonated fake romantic partners and directly interacted with victims for more than nine years.

A 41-year-old Ghanaian national was sentenced to 85 months in prison for stealing more than $10 million from mostly older, lonely and vulnerable victims via romance scams, the Justice Department said Tuesday. 

Derrick Van Yeboah was a longtime and high-ranking member of a criminal organization primarily based in Ghana linked to more than $100 million stolen from romance scams and business email compromises, officials said. Van Yeboah served as a “sakawa boy,” impersonating fake romantic partners and directly interacting with victims online from February 2015 to October 2024.

“Romance scammers do not simply steal money — they weaponize trust,” Jay Clayton, U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, said in a statement. 

Van Yeboah was arrested in Ghana in June 2025, acting on a request from the Justice Department, and extradited to the United States two months later. He pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud and agreed to forfeit $10.15 million in fraudulent proceeds as part of a plea agreement in March.

Authorities said they identified at least 20 of Van Yeboah’s victims, noting that some were deceived into sending their money to the criminal organization, creating companies and using those entities to unwittingly launder funds from other victims. 

Victims include a woman from Delaware who either sent or laundered $1.9 million, a woman from Ohio who sent or laundered $2.3 million and another woman who sent or laundered about $1 million. Van Yeboah also tricked a North Carolina man to send $123,000, claiming he needed a loan to pay for his mother’s funeral expenses and to remove imaginary gold and diamonds from storage in Italy, according to court records.

Officials said Van Yeboah received a substantial amount of money from his criminal acts. He told pretrial services his assets include a house worth $1.5 million and jewelry worth $515,000. When he was arrested, Ghanaian police found him in possession of two vehicles stolen from the United States and Canada.

“Victims lost large portions of their life savings, money they had counted on for retirement. They were emotionally devastated to learn that the personas they had been talking to every day, personas who claimed to be in love with them, were in fact frauds,” Clayton wrote in a pre-sentencing letter to the court. 

Van Yeboah’s conduct was cruel, and he fully understood the financial and emotional harm he was causing to his victims, he added. 

“Van Yeboah’s conduct was far from an aberration. Van Yeboah engaged in the fraud scheme for nine years. It wasn’t isolated conduct; it wasn’t a blip,” Clayton wrote. “Indeed, it appears to be the only real job Van Yeboah has ever had. Day after day, for years, he targeted vulnerable victims, lied to them, and stole from them.”

Government

• FBI officials say AI is bolstering adversaries, emphasizing need to focus on cyber basics, patching

• Feds accuse China of ‘systematic’ distillation of U.S. AI models

• CIA’s Michael Ellis says cyber intelligence is changing how the agency operates

• The G7 tells industry to hurry up and prep for post-quantum encryption

Technology

• European parliament members call for slowdown of Serbia’s EU entry over spyware use

• FCC proposes public scorecard to rate telecoms on anti-robocall efforts

• Pegasus, NoviSpy variant spyware found on devices of Serbian activists

• Wyden seeks upgraded NSA security guidance on commercial VPN use

Threats

• Microsoft discloses two actively exploited zero-days among 974 vulnerabilities

• Attackers exploit zero-days in consistently besieged SonicWall product

• Dogged Russia-based botnet dismantled after 23-year run

• FBI raises alarm over deceptive phishing campaign targeting prominent people

Policy

• Whistleblower says USPS deploying new, ‘untested’ IT systems governing mail-in ballots

• ‘Watershed 250’ test program in Texas looks to private sector for water cybersecurity help

• Former sexual abuse victims say Grok used their images, videos to train deepfake capabilities

• Cyber threats nudge Trump to sign executive order on foreign equipment in U.S. energy infrastructure