Hasty people and short cuts
It's worth narrating the tale of Evaldas Rimasauska's insane—but shockingly successful—scheme to steal $120 million from Google and Facebook.
The New York Times is the image's source.
Beginning in 2013, Rimasauska set up a business in Latvia using the name Quanta Computer, the exact same name as a Taiwanese manufacturer of hardware. a little suspicious, yes?
Then, over the course of two years, he routinely sent bills to Google and Facebook for goods from his fictitious company that he had never sold, complete with forged signatures, stamps, and a tonne of legalese. It sounds like a really bad idea. A business with the best legal and financial minds would surely just throw these false invoices away.
As you could have suspected, they didn't. Two of the top internet companies in the world transferred millions of dollars to Rimasauka seemingly without thinking twice. He would continue to send them fictitious invoices, and they would always pay. Rimasauska eventually amassed a sizable sum of money, taking $23 million from Google and $99 million from Facebook.
But he didn't remain wealthy for very long. He was eventually exposed, almost inevitably, and today he is serving a five-year sentence for wire fraud.
People will always associate financial fraud with massive, intricate, and expensive schemes—possibly involving server hacking or the theft of sensitive information. But what's fascinating about this example is that it demonstrates how even large corporations can be taken advantage of by such crude meth.
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