Evaldas Rimasauskas, a Lithuanian national involved in a highly profitable business email compromise (BEC) scheme that targeted Google and Facebook, has been sentenced to 5 years in prison, the U.S. Department of Justice announced on Thursday.
Rimasauskas has also been ordered to serve two years of supervised release, forfeit nearly $50 million and pay over $26 million in restitution.
The DoJ described the targets of the scheme as a multinational technology company and a multinational online social media firm, but the victims have been identified as Google and Facebook, respectively.
Rimasauskas was arrested by Lithuanian authorities in March 2017 and was extradited to the United States a few months later. He pleaded guilty to one count of wire fraud in March 2019.
According to authorities, Rimasauskas registered a company in Latvia with a name similar to Quanta Computer, a Taiwan-based hardware manufacturer that both Facebook and Google had done business with.
Between 2013 and 2015, the man and his accomplices sent phishing emails to employees of Google and Facebook, asking them to wire money to bank accounts in Latvia and Cyprus.
Since both companies regularly conducted multimillion-dollar transactions with Quanta, they agreed to send the money to the specified accounts, from which the funds were then transferred to other banks in Hong Kong, Cyprus, Slovakia, Hungary, Latvia and Lithuania.
Facebook wired nearly $100 million, while Google sent Rimasauskas and his accomplices over $23 million. Google said it recovered all of the money, while Facebook claimed to have recovered most of it.
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Eduard Kovacs (@EduardKovacs) is a contributing editor at SecurityWeek. He worked as a high school IT teacher for two years before starting a career in journalism as Softpedia’s security news reporter. Eduard holds a bachelor’s degree in industrial informatics and a master’s degree in computer techniques applied in electrical engineering.
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