Facebook, Google scammed

A Lithuanian man and his associates found a bold way to steal from Facebook and Google, according to his guilty plea last week: They asked for money via email.

More specifically, they sent fraudulent invoices to the California-based tech giants. The invoices were apparently good enough to persuade Google, which is owned by Alphabet, and Facebook to wire a total of more than $100 million for them from 2013 to 2015, according to the Justice Department.

The man, Evaldas Rimasauskas, 50, was involved in running a company that controlled several accounts at banks in Latvia and Cyprus, according to a 2016 indictment filed in the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York.

He and unnamed associates were essentially posing as Quanta Computer, a hardware company based in Taiwan that has done business with Facebook and Google, Reuters reported.

“As Evaldas Rimasauskas admitted today, he devised a blatant scheme to fleece U.S. companies out of $100 million, and then siphoned those funds to bank accounts around the globe,” Geoffrey S. Berman, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, said in a statement last Wednesday.

Rimasauskas was extradited from Lithuania to the United States in 2017. He has agreed to forfeit around $50 million, court documents show. After his guilty plea last week, he could face up to 30 years in prison. He is scheduled to be sentenced in July.

Rimasauskas said his role was to set up the bank accounts to facilitate the scheme, Bloomberg reported.

“I was asked to open bank accounts,” he reportedly said. “After that I did not do anything with these accounts.”

After money was wired from the tech companies to the bank accounts in Cyprus and Latvia, Rimasauskas “caused the stolen funds to be quickly wired into different bank accounts in various locations throughout the world, including Latvia, Cyprus, Slovakia, Lithuania, Hungary, and Hong Kong," the Justice Department said in its statement. It added that he also helped to supply banks with forged documents to explain the large transfers of money.

In emailed statements Sunday, Facebook said the company had “recovered the bulk of the funds shortly after the incident and has been cooperating with law enforcement in its investigation,” and Google said it had “detected this fraud and promptly alerted the authorities. We recouped the funds and we’re pleased this matter is resolved.”