How One Man Stole $122 Million From Google and Facebook

It sounds like something crazy out of an action-packed movie, something almost too incredible to believe could actually happen.

But it did happen.

Evaldas Rimasauskas from Lithuania was able to steal a total of $122 Million from Facebook and Google.

According to Boing Boing,

Last week, Evaldas Rimasauskas of Lithuania plead guilty to US wire fraud, aggravated identity theft, and money laundering charges, admitting that he had stolen $99m from Facebook and $23m from Google between 2013 and 2015.

Rimasauskas’s grift was pretty bold. He merely sent Google and Facebook invoices for items they hadn’t purchased and that he hadn’t provided, which the companies paid anyway. The invoices were accompanied by “forged invoices, contracts, and letters that falsely appeared to have been executed and signed by executives and agents of the Victim Companies, and which bore false corporate stamps embossed with the Victim Companies’ names, to be submitted to banks in support of the large volume of funds that were fraudulently transmitted via wire transfer.” He also spoofed emails that appeared to come from corporate execs.

It really is a pretty genius scheme. What’s so astonishing is that apparently, no one from the two tech giants bothered to verify the invoices.

Rimasauskas was claiming to be from Quanta Computer Inc, a massive Taiwanese hardware manufacturer. He even went as far as to register the company name in Latvia.

The man actually did plead guilty according to Bleeping Computer,

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,” stated Manhattan U.S. Attorney Geoffrey S. Berman in the DoJ press release containing the unsealed indictment from March 21, 2017.

According to the indictment [.PDF], Rimasauskas registered and incorporated a Latvian company with the same name as the Asian computer hardware manufacturer Quanta Computer Inc as reported by Bloomberg, and also opened multiple accounts at banks from Cyprus, Lithuania, Hungary, Slovakia, and Latvia to receive the fraudulent payments.

Rimasauskas will be sentenced on July 29 this year and is facing up to 30 years in prison.

 

Photo Credit: Office Space

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