A 27-year-old Nigerian man, Esogie Osawaru, has admitted taking part in a conspiracy to loot both Washington State’s Employment Security Department and state of Pennsylvania unemployment insurance funds, handing federal law enforcement officials the first conviction in a sweeping fraud that hobbled several states.

According to the Business Journal, Osawaru, 27, also known as “Milk Anthony,” has pleaded guilty to wire fraud and unlawful monetary transactions, court records show.

He has agreed to forfeit up to $1.3 million in assets he may own that are the proceeds from unemployment insurance fraud schemes and various other online scams, which saw him fleece victims in online romance schemes, according to court records filed in the U.S. District Court for Massachusetts.

Osawaru signed an agreement to plead guilty on Aug. 24th, but that was not announced publicly until Nov. 13. Although that announcement made no specific mention of his involvement in Washington state’s ESD fraud, it has been confirmed by officials here and in U.S. District court documents.

Osawaru will be sentenced at a court hearing on March 11, 2021. He will face deportation proceedings, but he was released on Nov. 11 and has put up a cash bond of $10,000 with the court, public records show.

Osawaru was ordered not to discuss or meet with any other suspect in the case and submit to location monitoring. He has surrendered his passport and was also ordered by U.S. District Court Judge Douglas Woodlock not to open any new bank accounts or lines of credit, or face the risk of going back to jail.

The FBI, which seized Osawaru’s email records from Microsoft headquarters, says it discovered that in mid-May unidentified co-conspirators caused Osawaru’s Eastern Bank account to get $10,710 from Washington state unemployment insurance benefits in the name of a Washington state resident.

The fraud victim told FBI special agents they never applied for state unemployment benefits and didn’t know Osawaru, FBI Special Agent Michael Livingood said in a sworn affidavit to get the search warrant.

Joseph Voccola, a Rhode Island attorney representing Osawaru, did not respond to the Business Journal’s requests for additional information about the case.

A spokeswoman for the FBI’s Boston field office declined to comment on Osawaru’s guilty plea or his involvement in the larger Washington state unemployment insurance fraud, which has lost the state more than $300 million.

Six unidentified co-conspirators allegedly worked the various frauds with Osawaru, other court records show.

United States Attorney Andrew E. Lelling in Boston and Joseph R. Bonavolonta, special agent in charge of the FBI Boston Field Division, said the Osawaru faces a sentence up to 20 years in prison, three years of probation, and a fine up to $250,000.

Osawaru and a second Nigerian, Nosayamen Iyalekhue, were arrested by the FBI in Boston in June.

Osawaru was also arrested by a local Massachusetts police agency in late May in a forged banking documents case.

In his plea in the FBI case, Osawaru admitted that he and others used a array of fake names, forged foreign passports and other documents to open multiple bank accounts. They used these bank accounts to receive proceeds of online crimes and quickly withdrew all the money at five different banks.

In 2019, for example, the FBI says Osawaru used a fraudulent Nigerian passport in the name of “Milk Anthony” to open three bank accounts. One of those accounts was at TD Bank USA, where Iyalekhue was an employee for about a year.

The FBI said in its June 2020 search warrant application that Iyalekhue was fired in 2019 when the bank’s global security and investigation team detected him engaging in misconduct. Iyalekhue’s case remains before the court, documents show.