Pierluigi Paganini
July 18, 2017
A Lithuanian man who is allegedly responsible for a $100 million scam (roughly 87 million euros) from tech companies Google and Facebook will be extradited to the United States soon.
The Lithuanian citizen Evaldas Rimasauskas (48) was arrested in March by local authorities. The US Law enforcement requested the arrest because the man stolen by the two IT giants the huge amount of money by posing as a large Asia-based hardware vendor.
The fraudulent activities happened between 2013 and 2015.
“The court has ruled in favor of extraditing Lithuanian citizen Evaldas Rimasauskas to the United States for criminal prosecution,” Judge Aiva Surviliene said.
Evaldas Rimasauskas is pictured in district court in Vilnius in May 2017 – Source AFP
The indictment explicitly mentioned Facebook and Google. According to the investigators, Rimasauskas created email accounts to trick victims into believing that the emails were sent by employees at the Asian hardware vendor.
He is accused of forging invoices, contracts, and letters to trick the administrative personnel into wiring over $100 million to overseas the bank accounts that he was managing.
The Rimasauskas’s lawyer, Snieguole Uzdaviniene, announced the intention of the man to appeal against the indictment.
Google confirmed that its systems were not hacked by the criminal, anyway, the company reviewed its internal processes and implemented countermeasures against email scams and BEC.
“We detected this fraud against our vendor management team and promptly alerted the authorities,” a Google spokesman told AFP.”We recouped the funds and we’re pleased this matter is resolved.”
Rimasauskas is waiting for the extradition and faces a maximum of 20 years in jail if convicted.
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(Security Affairs – cybercrime, email scam)
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