Recently, a scammer has tricked two major US tech companies into paying out of millions of dollars until the investigators caught up with this alleged thief.
Department of Justice and the FBI have charged man form Lithuania who has allegedly committed fraud that netted more than a $100 million.
“This case serves as a wake-up call to all companies – even the most sophisticated ones- that they too can be victims of the phishing attacks by cyber criminals,” Joon Kim, the acting US attorney said in a statement.
This indictment did not name the two tech companies that are scammed. The agencies identified one of the companies aspecialisinging in internet-related services and products” and the second one as a “multinational corporation providing the online social media and networking services.” Both of these have regularly carried out multimillion-dollar deals.
The social media giants like Facebook and Twitter did not respond to requests for their comments on this issue.
According to federal agencies, Evaldas Rimasauskas a 48 old man, pretended to be a popular Asian computer hardware company by registering his company in Latvia with his name in 2013. He has allegedly forged emails from various employees at the Asian hardware supplier and sent them invoices.
In his emails, Rimasauskas asked social network and web-service provider to send the payments to his bank accounts in Cyprus and Latvia, instead of the bank account of the real company in real company in Asia, the prosecutors said.
The two tech companies fell for this, wiring more than a huge $100 million to Rimasauskas before the cybercrime scheme came to an end, according to the court documents. He has spread his money through multiple accounts, including banks inHungary, Hong Kong, Latvia and Slovakia.
Rimasauskas also allegedly sent phishing emails to employees at the two victim companies, in an attempt to gain access to important documents.