One Evaldas Rimasauskas of Lithuania hatched his way into Google’s and Facebook’s treasury and made away with Ksh 12 Billion ( $!22m), before getting caught in the act later on.
Disguised as the giant Taiwanese hardware manufacturer Quanta Computer Inc together with another company registered in Latvia under the same name, Rimasauskas successfully plotted his agenda to steal from Google and Facebook.
He cautiously slipped invoices to Google and Facebook for items he had not to provide and the companies had not purchased only for the companies to dutifully respond with the payments for the allegedly purchased items.
Accompanying the invoices were “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.”
Rimasauskas also faked emails that appeared to come from corporate executives. Funny how no one counter checked to see if these corresponded to invoice that had been issued within the companies.
Being a prolific money-launderer who hid cash away in Cyprus, Lithuania, Hungary, Slovakia, and Latvia, Google was able to detect the fraud and alerted the authorities who helped with recouping the funds.
Rimasauskas pled guilty to US wire fraud, aggravated identity theft, and money laundering charges, admitting that he had made away with Ksh 9.9 Billion from Facebook and Ksh 2. 3 Billion from Google between 2013 and 2015.
“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 a press release containing the unsealed indictment.
Rimasauskas faces up to 30 years behind bars and his sentence is Dated for 29 July.
