A Lithuanian man was able to scam $23 million from Google and $99 million from Facebook. And he did it using one of the oldest tricks in the book:
He asked them to give it to him.
Granted, it’s actually a bit more complicated than that. What Evaldas Rimasauskas actually did was send them invoices for work he didn’t actually do. And, surprisingly, they paid up.
Though to be fair, according to Boing Boing, he went to the effort to make the invoices look legit. He forged paperwork, contacts, letters. He even mocked up official looking emails from corporate executives. It didn’t hurt that he was also pretending to be Quanta Computer Inc., a Taiwanese hardware company. He went so far as to register a company under that name in Latvia to really bring the ruse home.
And basically, no one really even checked these credentials. They simply paid him. And then Rimasauskas took all that money and stuck it in a number of bank accounts in Lithuania, Cyprus, Hungary, Latvia, and Slovakia. And it was some time before Google cottoned on to the trick.
Currently, Rimasauskas faces charges of US wire fraud, aggravated identity theft, and money laundering. He has agreed to forfeit $50 million of the $122 million he defrauded the companies of. He will be sentenced July 29th this year, and could face up to 30 years in prison.
Source: IGN
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