US law enforcement is cracking down on a pair of alleged online fraudsters that appear to have been wildly successful. The United Arab Emirates has sent the US two Nigerian nationals, Ramon Olorunwa Abbas and Olakean Jacob Ponle, to face charges relating to large “business email compromise” scams. Abbas is accused of money laundering in schemes meant to pull in “hundreds of millions of dollars,” according to the Justice Department. He reportedly helped with a plan to launder $14.7 million stolen from a “foreign financial institution,” helped take nearly $923,000 from a New York law firm and was even involved in a plot to steal roughly $124 million from an English Premier League club.

Ponle, meanwhile, allegedly participated in several 2019 fraud campaigns that were worth “tens of millions of dollars,” including one Chicago-based company that sen a total of $15.2 million. According to the claim, Ponle had victims wire funds to money mules who converted the gains to Bitcoin and sent them to a digital wallet the mastermind controlled.

The campaign comes at a particularly bad time when the pandemic has forced a record number of people out of work. These scams force governments to look into scams right at a moment when many legitimate claimants — in at least one case, officials have needed to halt payments after discovering phony claims.

It’s not clear what action (if any) American authorities can take to stop the fraud. However, the scams underscore the importance of protecting against identity theft, both for individuals and companies. They also make clear that governments need to tighten online security for unemployment and other systems that require sensitive info — strict safeguards for data don’t matter if there aren’t enough checks to make sure it’s being used properly.

The Portugal-South Africa portion of the Equiano cable should be up and running in 2021. It’s named after writer and abolitionist Olaudah Equiano, who was born in Nigeria — a likely port of call for an extension of the cable.

Google says it has invested $47 billion over the last three years to bolster its tech infrastructure. Equiano is the 14th cable it has a stake in overall, and Google’s third private international cable project. The first, Curie, was completed in April and runs between Chile and Los Angeles. The other cable, Dunant, will link France and the US and should be online next year. Such cables are vital for connectivity, as they shuttle around 99 percent of the planet’s data traffic.

The Equiano cable, which will be installed by Alcatel Submarine Networks, is a little different from the others, according to Google. “Equiano will be the first subsea cable to incorporate optical switching at the fiber-pair level, rather than the traditional approach of wavelength-level switching,” it wrote in a blog post. Google also claimed it’ll have around “20 times more network capacity than the last cable built to serve this region.”