A Lithuanian man has pleaded guilty to defrauding tech giants Google & Facebook out of more than $100 million

The elaborate scheme involving Evaldas Rimasauskas  and other unnamed co-conspirators, who were able to impersonate a Taiwan-based hardware manufacturer, Quanta Computer (with which both Google & Facebook do business).

Using a fake company, set up with the same name and a series of fake emails, invoices, contracts, letters and corporate stamps, the corporate impersonators swindled Google and Facebook out of $100,000,000 in the short space of 2 years!

Once payments had been wired over, the money was laundered through several other bank accounts.

The FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center warned that this type of fraud, called a Business Email Compromise, is becoming much more common, issuing the following advisory'

"The BEC scam continues to grow, evolve, and target businesses of all sizes. Since January 2015, there has been a 1,300 percent increase in identified exposed losses, now totalling over $3 billion.”


How can organisations protect themselves against fraud like this?

It would seem logical that finance teams perform rigorous checks on any invoices or receipts that are sent in, before they are actually paid, including various layers of authorisation, but with larger companies, this may not always be possible, and only basic checks may be done.

It goes without saying that the key to stopping fraud starts with being able to identify it. It would be a wise investment to ensure that all members of finance teams are trained in spotting potential concerns with incoming invoices.

However, the problem with manual checking is the element of human error. The best way to remove this is by automating as much of the process as possible.

Where expense management is concerned, fraud is rife. Whether intentional or not, employees can be regularly defrauding their employers. MEO-Business aims to significantly reduce this with our product, MyExpenses. It will highlight unusual expenses, areas of high spend and not allow expense claims that go outside of company policy to be processed. It will also help to eliminate over inflated mileage costs at the point of entry, as it calculates the journey for you.

Click here to find out more.