TALLAHASSEE, Fla.—Attorney General Ashley Moody’s Office of Statewide Prosecution, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement and the Broward Office of the Inspector General today announced the arrests of two individuals for their roles in defrauding the City of Pembroke Pines out of more than $700,000 in security protection services. FDLE agents, working with the Attorney General’s OSP, arrested Ololade Shokunbi and Oluwatoyin Laditan in Miami-Dade County for organized scheme to defraud. The defendants are accused of defrauding Pembroke Pines using the city’s contract with Bayus Security Services, Inc, and Bayus Security Protection, Inc., now defunct companies, to provide security services at several city-owned properties. A third defendant, Olalekan Shokunbi, remains at-large.
Attorney General Ashley Moody said, “Taxpayers expect that their cities will spend their hard-earned money on goods and services to help the public. In this case, Pembroke Pines residents believed that Bayus was keeping them safe and secure while on city property. However, these operators made the public less safe by using unlicensed guards, unarmed guards or no guards at all. Protecting citizens is a major tenet of my administration, and we will fight to ensure these criminals face justice.”
FDLE Commissioner Rick Swearingen said, “These suspects defrauded the citizens of Pembroke Pines. I appreciate the partnership between FDLE, AG Moody’s Office of Statewide Prosecution and the Broward Office of the Inspector General to ensure taxpayers aren’t being scammed out of their money.”
According to the investigation, between October 2012 and June 2017, Olalekan Shokunbi and Ololade Shokunbi, the owners of Bayus Security Protection, along with the help of Oluwatoyin Laditan, the operation manager of Bayus Security Protection, fraudulently billed the city more than $700,000 for services never provided.
The scheme included billing for armed and unarmed security officers when the individuals whose names appeared on the invoices were not licensed to be a security officer, or, if licensed, were not licensed to be armed. It also included billing for security services when Bayus’s logbooks reflected that no one was on post, billing for the same security officer’s services at multiple locations at the same time, and billing for services provided by non-existent individuals.
Attorney General Moody’s Assistant Statewide Prosecutor Priscilla Prado will prosecute the case.
