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

Unlimited greediness is your enemy

[hcs_$reboot]

The guy could have stopped after a few weeks and enjoy a few millions bucks abroad. No he had to want more and more. Until he's caught.

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...