By ANN BROWN
Evaldas Rimasauskas of Lithuania scammed $122 million from Facebook and Google. And it was surprisingly easy. All he did was send the two tech giants bills for items they hadn’t purchased and for services and products he hadn’t provided, yet they paid without even checking out the invoices.
Alas, he was caught and Rimasauskas has “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,” Boing Boing reported.
He was thorough in his scam. He “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 created fake emails that seemed to have been sent to him from corporate execs.
In the invoices, Rimasauskas, a well-known international money launderer, was pretending to be the giant Taiwanese hardware manufacturer Quanta Computer Inc. He even registered a company in Latvia with the same name.
As part of his plea deal, agreed to return about $50 million (there has not been any information about the other $73 million he took).
Rimasauskas, who will be sentenced on July 29, faces up to 30 years in prison.
moguldom.com