DOJ Files to Revoke Citizenship of Tax Fraud Convict

The U.S. Department of Justice filed a civil lawsuit on March 18, 2026, in the U.S. District Court in Baltimore, Maryland, seeking to revoke the citizenship of Emmanuel Oluwatosin Kazeem, a Nigerian national convicted of orchestrating a large-scale identity theft and tax fraud scheme that affected more than 259,000 victims.

Authorities allege that Kazeem, who became a naturalized U.S. citizen, led a conspiracy from 2012 to 2015 that involved purchasing over 91,000 stolen personal identities from a Vietnamese hacker. The identities originated from a private database of an Oregon company that conducted background checks for clients. Kazeem divided the data into batches and distributed it to accomplices, including his younger brother, Michael Oluwasegun Kazeem, who used the information to file fraudulent federal tax returns. The group obtained more than 19,500 electronic filing PINs to bypass Internal Revenue Service authentication and accessed sensitive taxpayer transcripts without authorization. They directed refunds to prepaid debit cards linked to the stolen identities.

In total, the scheme resulted in 10,139 fraudulent returns attempting to claim over $91 million from the IRS,...