A Canadian and U.S. dual-national was sentenced to 11 years in prison for laundering illicit funds from cybercrime schemes such as business email compromise, ATM cash-outs, and bank cyber-heists.
The man, Ghaleb Alaumary, 36, of Mississauga, Ontario, pleaded guilty to two counts of money laundering conspiracy and received a 140-months prison sentence. He was also ordered to pay more than $30 million in restitution.
Documents presented in court show that Alaumary and his co-conspirators engaged in ATM cash-out operations, BEC schemes, and bank cyber-heists to steal funds. Then, they used various bank accounts and digital currency to launder the money.
Alaumary pleaded guilty in the Southern District of Georgia in one money laundering case in which he conspired to send spoofed emails to a Canadian university in 2017. The emails purported to come from a construction company and demanded that payment was made for a major building project.
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The scheme resulted in the university wiring $11.8 million CAD (roughly $9.4 million USD) to a bank account controlled by Alaumary and his co-conspirators, who then arranged with various people in the U.S. and abroad to launder the funds, according to a statement from the U.S. Justice Department.
Weeks later, Alaumary was involved in a scheme in which a co-conspirator made several trips to Texas to steal hundreds of thousands of dollars through impersonating wealthy bank customers.
Alaumary pleaded guilty in a second case to recruiting individuals to withdraw stolen funds from ATMs. The funds came from bank cyber-heists and various fraud schemes and were laundered through cash withdrawals, wire transfers, and through cryptocurrency.
Some of the funds, the United States Department of Justice reveals, came from a 2019 Maltese bank cyber-heist perpetrated by North Korean hackers.
Alaumary and his co-conspirators also targeted banks headquartered in India, Malta, and Pakistan, as well as businesses in the U.S. and the U.K., individuals in the U.S., and a professional soccer club in the U.K.
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