Nigerian man sentenced for scamming women using AG’s image

HELENA (AP) – A Nigerian man has been sentenced for setting up an online dating profile using a photo of Montana’s attorney general and scamming an Indiana woman out of thousands of dollars.

The Kosciusko County, Indiana, attorney’s office said Kazeem Owanla was recently sentenced to 36 months in jail with 26 suspended and paid $16,300 in restitution to two women. He was given credit for time served and was turned over to the custody of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.

Owanla, 45, was charged in October after an Indiana woman reported sending more than $100,000 to a man who represented himself as John Tony Hagan, an electrical engineer who ran into financial difficulties while working in Egypt.

Owanla was arrested in November when he got off an airplane in Atlanta. His bail was set at $150,000 cash, enough to cover the women’s losses, prosecutors said.

He sought a bond reduction, but a judge denied it in January. An attorney for Owanla did not return a phone call seeking comment.

The Indiana woman who first complained said she met “Hagan” online in January 2014 and by the next month he was asking her for money to replace stolen tools, pay his workers and to replace $25,000 that was supposedly taken when his interpreter was stabbed after they made a bank withdrawal.

In June, the woman provided investigators with receipts showing she wired or made bank transfers totaling more than $100,000 to the man she believed was Hagan, court records said.

“It got pretty intense fairly quickly,” the woman told South Bend, Indiana, television station WNDU-TV in July on the condition the station not use her name because she was embarrassed that she fell for the scam. “Lots of passion and attention.”

A deputy found the bank transfers from the woman were ending up in an account owned by Owanla, who was in the U.S. on a visitor’s visa in 2013.

The investigation also turned up a $1,550 bank transfer from an Ohio woman who told a similar story. She met a man online who identified himself as Henry Tesone, an electrical engineer in South Africa who was headed to Egypt to work. He also used stolen tools and other similar reasons to get the Ohio woman to send him a total of $11,590.

The photo used on the Hagan profile was taken from Montana Attorney General Tim Fox’s campaign website without his permission.

In August, Fox’s spokesman, John Barnes, said the attorney general was upset his image was used. He noted the con artist chose the photo of someone who oversees consumer protection and warns of scams.