Google and Facebook Became Victims of $100M Payment Scam

The Justice Department has announced the arrest of a man last month who is allegedly swindled in more than $100 million from two U.S. tech giants.

This news came wrapped in a little mystery. The agency did not say who was robbed, and also did not say who is the Asian supplier the crook impersonated to pull off this scheme.

The mystery is now unravelled. A Fortune investigation, which has involved the interviews with sources close to the law enforcement and other figures, has revealed the identities of the three unnamed companies and other details of this case.

The criminal case shows how the scams involving fake suppliers and email phishing can victimise even the most sophisticated and tech-savvy corporations. But the crime also raises the questions about why these companies have so far kept this silent and whether as a former head of the Securities and the Exchange Commission observes as it triggers an obligation to tell the investors about what had happened.

In 2013, a 40 or something Lithuanian named Evaldas Rimasauskas has allegedly hatched an elaborate scheme to defraud the U.S. tech companies. According to Justice Department, he has forged invoices, email addresses, and corporate stamps in order to impersonate large Asian-based manufacturer with whom these tech firms had regularly did business. The point was to trick the companies into paying for the computer supplies.

His scheme worked. In the two-year span, the corporate imposter has convinced accounting departments at two tech companies to make the transfers worth tens of millions of dollars. By the time the firms figured out what was going on, Rimasauskas had coaxed out over $100 million in payments, which he promptly stashed in bank accounts across Eastern Europe.

These allegations first appeared in a sealed indictment filed by federal prosecutors in New York last December.