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A “prolific” money launderer who moved millions of pounds derived from invoice redirection fraud schemes for dozens of crime syndicates across the globe was jailed in London on Tuesday.

Kazeem Akinwale, a 43-year-old Nigerian national living in the U.K. capital, was sentenced to nine years in prison for concealing and transferring and more than £6 million stolen from more than a hundred businesses worldwide from 2013 to 2017, largely through bank accounts opened in Great Britain.

Akinwale sat at the center of a complex and “sophisticated” international money-laundering scheme, orchestrating transfers of funds profits from fraud into accounts opened by money mules and ordering those individuals to withdraw the cash, the Old Bailey, the United Kingdom’s central criminal court, heard.

“This was sophisticated, organized and international offending,” Judge Mark Dennis told Akinwale at the sentencing hearing Tuesday. “The evidence shows the international range of [your] reputation and of the frauds you were involved in.”

Akinwale, who moved to the United Kingdom from Nigeria in 2013, appeared on the radar of the National Crime Agency, or NCA, in March 2016 after London auction house Christie’s reported that hackers had spoofed an employee’s email address to divert a payment for a customer invoice into another bank account.

The NCA arrested Akinwale the following month after linking an IP address used to access the intended beneficiary’s account to his home in southeast London, from which investigators recovered a laptop and two smartphones containing a “money launderer’s treasure trove” of information.

The trove included login credentials for more than 200 accounts at British high street lenders as well as banks in Poland, Hong Kong and other jurisdictions. Many of the accounts were controlled by money mules operating under the direction of Akinwale, prosecutors claimed during the three-week trial.

Akinwale used the alias “Ola Gapiano” to communicate with criminals in Nigeria, the United Kingdom and United States via WhatsApp, email and Skype and coordinate the movement of funds derived from invoice redirection frauds against companies in Romania, China, South Korea and other countries.

The devices contained numerous references to victims’ bank accounts and money-mule accounts used to launder the proceeds of the fraud schemes, which ranged in size from a few thousand to hundreds of thousands of pounds.

“The messages demonstrated that the defendant was constantly managing the accounts,” prosecuting barrister Frederick Hookway told the court. “But they required constant updating because when an account was used the bank or victim would catch on, so for the money laundering to continue, new accounts would have to be obtained.”

Akinwale typically would provide those perpetrating the fraud with details of a beneficiary account before directing “mule herders”—individuals who controlled the money mules—to arrange withdrawals of the cash.

Prosecutors said Akinwale would divide larger amounts into smaller sums and transfer them into several bank accounts to escape the notice of compliance departments.

In one case involving a Nigerian crime syndicate, cash was withdrawn from U.K. banks before the lion’s share of the funds arrived back in Nigeria via money services businesses. Akinwale also transferred some of the funds to banks overseas, including in the United States.

The mule herders and the mules each took a cut of the proceeds while Akinwale, the lynchpin of the operation, deposited more than £73,000 in “direct commission” into his personal bank accounts, the court heard.

Akinwale will have his access to digital devices and bank accounts restricted after his release from prison.

Jamie Horncastle, an investigator with the NCA’s National Cyber Crime Unit, told ACAMS moneylaundering.com after the hearing that the case shows the increasing reach of professional money launderers and role of modern digital technology in facilitating illicit finance.

“This is a person sitting at the top of an international, highly organized network that allows him to offer a professional money-laundering service to people who go to him knowing he will cash out their money.”

Contact Koos Couvée at kcouvee@acams.org