Shark Bait
Emailed on February 28th 2020 in The Friday Forward
Shark Tank judge Barbara Corcoran lost nearly $400,000 in an elaborate email scam that tricked her staff.
Corcoran said someone acting as her assistant sent an invoice to her bookkeeper earlier this week for a renovation payment. She told People that she had "no reason to be suspicious" about the email because she invests in real estate, so the bookkeeper wired $388,700 to the email address.
Corcoran said the scammer has "disappeared," and she acknowledged that she wouldn't be getting her money back.
Sound familiar? This reminded me of a much larger scam involving Google and Facebook that broke news last year. In March of 2019 a Lithuanian man plead guilty to bilking Google and Facebook out of more than $100 million in an elaborate scheme involving a fake company, fake emails and fake invoices.
The Department of Justice alleged that Evaldas Rimasauskas and other unnamed co-conspirators impersonated the Taiwan-based hardware manufacturer, Quanta Computer — with which both tech companies do business — by setting up a company in Latvia with the same name. Using myriad forged invoices, contracts, letters, corporate stamps, and general confusion created by the corporate doppelgänger, they successfully duped Google and Facebook into paying tens of million of dollars in fraudulent bills from 2013 to 2015.
The payments were wired to bank accounts controlled by Rimasauskas, which he subsequently laundered through several other bank accounts throughout Latvia, Cyprus, Slovakia, Lithuania, Hungary and Hong Kong.
The 50-year-old agreed to forfeit $49.7 million and is currently in jail.
