Lithuanian Pleads Guilty To Stealing $100 Million From Google, Facebook (bleepingcomputer.com)

schwit1 writes: Evaldas Rimasauskas, a Lithuanian citizen, concocted a brazen scheme that allowed him to bilk Facebook and Google out of more than $100 million. The crime defrauded Google of $23 million and Facebook of $99 million. Rimasauskas committed the crimes between 2013 to 2015, an indictment was issued in 2017, and he was formally indicted Wednesday in New York after he pleaded guilty to wire fraud, aggravated identity theft, and three counts of money laundering.

"As Evaldas Rimasauskas admitted today, he devised a blatant scheme to fleece U.S. companies out of over $100 million, and then siphoned those funds to bank accounts around the globe," said U.S. Attorney Geoffrey S. Berman in a DoJ press release. How did he do it? The indictment reveals that he simply billed the companies for the amounts and they paid the bills. Rimasauskas was able to trick company employees into wiring the money to multiple bank accounts that he controlled and had set up in institutions in Cyprus, Lithuania, Hungary, Slovakia, and Latvia.

Comments

I get these too!

[resfilter]

It's interesting to see the big guys getting hit with these scams..

In our medium sized single-store retail business, we've seen a huge surge in the last few years in false invoicing from companies we've never dealt with.

For example, you'll get a $424.93 invoice from Artin Technology Consulting Inc. or a $129.00 invoice from Joe's Plumbing, with an address close to where you are, but a head office/billing address out of the country or something. It may even be a real company but with an altered address to send payment to. The services appear to be normal things that you buy. I've often wondered if they dumpster dive to farm data.

We've caught our accountants almost paying the bills due to how similar they look to normal business expenses and overhead for everything from tech services to building maintenance..

They often have purchase order numbers and authorization information from a general manager or something (probably they harvested those from our website's 'contact' section, or simply called in and asked who the general manager is..).

Really all you have to do is keep a proper database of vendors and services, only send payment to addresses on file, and only add a vendor to a database when you're damn sure they're real, and you're good to go.

Weird unknown bill? Screw it, just wait 30 days until any sane company would be hunting you down trying to charge you interest. If it's a scam they probably wont bother you again.

Re: This is a scam that actually works

[alexgieg]

Here in Brazil this is so common that all financial departments of all companies are trained to spot fake billings. Ours always calls our department to check whether a bill that seems related to what we do is legit. And there must be a paper trail showing the goods or services the bill refers to was in fact originally approved by someone with the authority to approve them.

By the way, Brazilian law doesn't consider it a crime to send random bills. Anyone can bill anyone anything as long as they use the proper, standardized, bank-approved method, called "boleto". This makes fake billings even more difficult to distinguish from real ones...