A US judge has sentenced 40-year-old Nigerian Chukwuemeka Amachukwu to eight years behind bars for his involvement in cyber intrusions, identity theft and fraud schemes that generated millions of dollars.

Amachukwu, who also uses the names Chukwuemeka Victor Eletuo and So Kwan Leung, was sentenced by US District Judge Paul G. Gardephe, the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York said in a statement on Monday.

He previously entered guilty pleas to charges of conspiring to carry out computer intrusions and to commit wire fraud.

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Prosecutors said Amachukwu and co-conspirators including Kingsley Uchelue Utulu started targeting US tax preparation businesses in 2019, using spear-phishing emails to gain access to their electronic systems.

The group is alleged to have stolen tax and other personal information belonging to about 800 customers of businesses in New York, Texas and other states.

Those identities were then used to file fraudulent tax returns with the Internal Revenue Service and state tax authorities, according to the statement. Refund claims in the scheme reached at least $8.4 million, and at least $2.5 million was paid out, the statement said.

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The stolen identities were also used in fraudulent applications to the Small Business Administration’s Economic Injury Disaster Loan programme, which yielded at least $819,000 in illicit payments, the statement said.

Another scheme involved Amachukwu pitching investments in standby letters of credit described as valuable to victims in the US; he posed as a rich foreign financier to persuade them to put money in. According to the statement, the investments were fictitious and yielded more than $7 million for Amachukwu and his co-conspirators.

According to US Attorney Jamie McDonald, Amachukwu had thought he could act outside the reach of US law enforcement.

“Amachukwu took part in sophisticated schemes to hack into U.S. businesses, steal and use stolen identity information of victims, and commit fraud. These crimes imposed significant harm on the victims and the public, and so it is only appropriate that the crimes also come with a significant sentence for the defendant,” McDonald said.

The judge also imposed one year of supervised release and ordered Amachukwu to pay $3,647,629.39 in restitution. A forfeiture order of $10,846,634.39 was added to the sentence.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation provided assistance in the probe, and Assistant US Attorney Daniel G. Nessim was the prosecutor on the case.