A Dublin law student, Adeleke Adelani (27), has been sentenced to 21 months in prison for laundering over €100,000 stolen in a series of invoice redirection scams. Gardai investigating the fraud, which affected a Cork resident, a Mayo-based agri-business, and an Italian company, found 50 images of unrelated bank accounts on Adelani’s phone. Authorities revealed that €124,000 passed through his accounts, with only €3,500 legitimately accounted for.
Court proceedings indicated that Adelani was not involved in setting up the scams but acted as a recruiter for money mule bank accounts used to facilitate the thefts. Adelani, residing at Riverside View, Letterkenny, pleaded guilty to laundering €100,397 in November 2019 and January 2020, as well as laundering proceeds of crime from October 2018 to February 2021.
In one case, a Cork homeowner wiring a final construction payment unknowingly sent €9,245 to a fraudulent account. Similarly, a Mayo company wired €91,152 to a falsified bank account in Dublin, resulting in a loss of €28,634. An Italian company lost €22,581 in a related fraud scheme. Investigators found that several of the bank accounts Adelani used belonged to people with no connection to him, including fellow law students and a member of Dublin Fire Brigade.
Adelani claimed the funds came from cutting hair during the COVID-19 lockdown. He has previous convictions for assault, false imprisonment, burglary, and other offenses. Judge Martin Nolan noted that Adelani “was up to his neck in money laundering” and that he earned substantial rewards for procuring the mule accounts.
Adelani’s 21-month sentence will run consecutively with a prior seven-year partially suspended sentence, which is due to expire in November 2029. Judge Nolan added that, without the existing sentence, the headline term would have been around four years.
