KEY POINTS

• The US DOJ filed a suit to revoke the citizenship of Nigerian Emmanuel Kazeem over an $11 million fraud.
• Kazeem was convicted on 19 counts in 2018 and sentenced to 15 years before Biden commuted his sentence.
• The suit also alleges Kazeem entered a sham marriage to obtain his permanent resident status.

The United States Department of Justice has filed a lawsuit to revoke the citizenship of a Nigerian national, Emmanuel Oluwatosin Kazeem, years after a federal court convicted him of orchestrating one of the most elaborate tax fraud schemes federal authorities have ever prosecuted.

The Emmanuel Kazeem US citizenship revocation suit, filed in March 2026 and published on the DoJ website, alleges that Kazeem’s fraud activities, committed both before and after his naturalisation, disqualified him from lawfully obtaining American citizenship in the first place. The department also alleges that Kazeem entered a sham marriage to secure permanent resident status, then married a second woman, compounding the disqualification.

How the scheme worked

Kazeem was convicted in 2018 on 19 counts covering wire fraud, aggravated identity theft, and conspiracy to commit wire and mail fraud. A federal court sentenced him to 15 years in prison and ordered him to pay more than $12 million in restitution. Former President Joe Biden later commuted his sentence and released him from prison.

The operation began surfacing in May 2013 when a victim in Medford, Oregon, alerted the Internal Revenue Service that someone had filed fraudulent federal and state tax returns using her and her husband’s personal information. The investigation that followed led agents to residences in Illinois, Maryland, and Georgia, where they seized approximately 150 prepaid debit cards, $50,000 in money orders, more than 50 electronic devices, and over $12,000 in fraudulent tax refunds loaded onto prepaid cards.

The trail led to Kazeem as the scheme’s leader. He purchased more than 91,000 stolen identities from a Vietnamese hacker who sourced them from an Oregon company’s private background-check database, divided the identities into batches, and distributed them to co-conspirators, including his younger brother Michael Oluwasegun Kazeem. The group used the stolen information to file fraudulent tax returns between 2012 and 2015.

Scale of the fraud that is about to lead to US citizenship revocation

The Emmanuel Kazeem US citizenship revocation suit details the full scope of the operation. Kazeem and his co-conspirators acquired over 19,500 electronic filing PINs to bypass IRS authentication systems and used stolen identities to access IRS transcripts. In total, the scheme attempted to claim more than $91 million in fraudulent refunds and successfully extracted over $11.6 million.

At least 2,000 wire transfers totalling more than $2.1 million went to Nigeria, with over 700 of those transfers, worth more than $690,000, linked directly to Kazeem. He used the proceeds to make a nearly $200,000 down payment on a newly built Maryland house, purchase a $175,000 townhouse, and attempt to develop a $6 million hotel in Lagos. Before his arrest, he transferred the townhouse to his sister in Nigeria for $10 and added her to the deed of his other property for the same amount.

The move sits within a broader Trump administration push to strip citizenship from naturalised Americans with criminal histories and accelerate deportations of foreign nationals convicted of serious offences.