Queens man among four nabbed for providing cryptocurrency to ISIS

A Queens man and co-conspirators from New Jersey, Canada and Virginia were nabbed for transferring over $35,000 to support ISIS, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York announced Wednesday.

Abdullah At Taqi, 23, of East Elmhurst, along with Seema Rahman, 25, of Edison, N.J., and Mohammad David Hashimi, 35, of Potomac Falls were arrested in their respective home states on Wednesday morning. They were charged with conspiring to provide material support to a terrorist organization.

The fourth defendant, Kahlilullah Yousuf, 34, of Ontario Canada, was arrested by Canadian law enforcement, the U.S. Attorney’s Office said.

Between February 2021 and July 2022, the group collected and sent more than $35,000 using Bitcoin wallets, bogus GoFundMe campaigns and PayPal to send the funds.

Hashimi and Yousuf were a part of a group chat on an encrypted messaging service in which they communicated with other ISIS supporters and discussed posting donation links that appeared to be for humanitarian causes but were in fact intended to fund the “muhjahideen” Arabic for “holy warriors,” according to the criminal complaint.

Yousuf and Rahman created the GoFundMe pages and Hasimi and Taqi contributed to them, feds said. Yousuf, Taqi and Rahman sent more than $24,000 to the organizers’ Bitcoin address.

In November 2020, Hashimi told a confidential source over encrypted communications that he wished to die in combat or in a terrorist attack, court records show.

“I have made up my mind I want to make Hijra [emigration] to Afghanistan. To join jawla,” he wrote. In other words, he wanted to travel to join ISIS.

Between December 2021 and October 2022, Hashimi gave more than $2,000 to a terrorism defendant through “JPay,” an inmate funding service, feds said. He provided financial support to numerous others convicted of federal crimes of terrorism, according to the criminal complaint.

“I commend our prosecutors and the FBI’s New York Joint Terrorism Task Force for piercing the veil of secrecy to identify the perpetrators of this scheme, reveal the true evil nature of these virtual money transfers, and bring to justice those who seek to enable acts of violent extremism,” said U.S. Attorney Breon Peace.