Google and Facebook fall for $100 MILLION phishing scam

Google and Facebook fall for $100 MILLION phishing scam



Google and Facebook were conned out of $100million (£77.3million) in a phishing scam that involved sending emails to employees at the companies and asking them to wire money.

Last month it was revealed that two major tech companies were tricked by a Lithuanian man into sending him $100million each as part of a scheme in which he impersonated a Taiwanese electronics manufacturer. The tech companies involved weren't named at the time.

Evaldas Rimasauskas was arrested this month in Lithuania at the request of US authorities and is currently in jail on wire fraud, money laundering and aggravated identity theft charges.



Rimasauskas' alleged scheme involved sending emails to employees of the tech giants asking them to wire money that they actually owed to the Asian hardware vendor to the accounts of companies in Latvia and Cyprus that carried the name Quanta.

In order to conceal his fraud from banks that handled the transfers, Rimasaukas forged invoices, contracts and letters purportedly signed by executives of the two victim companies, according to prosecutors.

An investigation by Fortune published on Thursday revealed that the two major tech companies affected were Google and Facebook, who both paid out more than $100million.

A Facebook spokesperson told MailOnline: 'Facebook recovered the bulk of the funds shortly after the incident and has been cooperating with law enforcement in its investigation.'

Google, too, said it had 'detected this fraud against our vendor management team and promptly alerted the authorities. We recouped the funds and we're pleased this matter is resolved'.

In a statement last month to Reuters, Quanta spokeswoman Carol Hu said the company had been 'impersonated' as part of the fraud.

'Quanta did not suffer from any financial harm from this incident,' she added, calling the matter 'unfortunate'.



Quanta, with a market capitalization of $8.4 billion, is a supplier of servers and other hardware to major technology companies. It is part of the Open Compute Project, an initiative launched by Facebook Inc to share server design technology. In 2011 Amazon.com Inc outsourced the assembly of its Kindle Fire tablet to Quanta.

Rimasauskas, through his lawyer, confirmed he was the owner of a Latvian company with the same name as Quanta from 2013 to 2016, the time frame in which the fraud occurred, according to the indictment.

'Rimasauskas did buy the Latvian company, because he was going to develop a business,' the lawyer, Linas Kuprusevicius, told Reuters in an email.

Rimasauskas strongly contests the charges presented by US authorities, the lawyer said.

He has a construction engineering degree and was working at a construction business in Lithuania prior to his arrest, he said.

The US Federal Bureau of Investigation said last year that US and foreign victims had made 22,143 complaints since October 2013 about so-called business email compromise scams involving requests for more than $3 billion in transfers.

A US extradition request for Rimasauskas is expected by late May, Lithuanian prosecutors told Reuters.

He is charged with wire fraud and money laundering, which each carry a maximum prison sentence of 20 years, and identity theft, which carries a mandatory minimum sentence of two years.

Despite falling for the fraud, and an advertiser boycott of its video platform YouTube, Google has raked in huge profits this year.

The internet giant's parent company Alphabet boasted a 'terrific start' to 2017 despite more than 250 companies pulling adverts from its video sharing site.

Sales leapt 22% to £19.1 billion in the first three months of the year, compared to the same period the year before, while advertising sales climbed 19% to £16.6 billion.

YouTube faced a torrent of criticism earlier this year after brands found their adverts were being shown alongside jihadist, white supremacist and rape apologist videos.

BT, Waitrose, Cancer Research UK, the Co-Op Group and Mercedes Benz were just a few of the firms that joined the boycott.

Alphabet's profits also climbed this year, reaching £4.1 billion, compared to £3.2 billion last year.