An American company that is not yet identified fraud made him last year for nearly $ 100 million by people who created a fake e-mail address in order to impersonate legitimate one of its suppliers, according to US authorities on Thursday.
The company had filed a civil forfeiture in federal court in Manhattan trying to recover about $ 25 million in the proceeds of fraud that took place in at least 20 bank accounts around the world.
Almost $ 74 million has been recovered and returned to the US firm, officials said. The FBI said in an alert companies issued last week that the companies had suffered $ 2.3 billion worldwide in losses email scams by transfers from October 2013 to February this year.
The lawsuit filed Thursday appears to be the biggest scam email I have seen, said Tom Brown, a former federal prosecutor in Manhattan who is now CEO of the practice of cyber security Berkeley Research Group.
The scheme in question in the lawsuit Thursday took place between August and September and was identified after a bank based in Cyprus identified suspicious transfers, officials said.
According to the lawsuit, the authors carried out the scam by creating a fake email address that resembled the one of the sellers of the company in Asia.
Then individuals posing as a salesman while communicating with a professional services firm that was hired to handle the details and logistics of payments to suppliers of the US company, the lawsuit said.
Euro bank, which did not respond to an email seeking comment on its own initiative in September restricted almost $ 74 million of funds.
The remaining $ 25 million was laundered through other accounts, in cities such as Cyprus, Latvia, Hungary, Estonia, Lithuania, Slovakia and Hong Kong, officials said.
Foreign governments, at the request of the US authorities have held 20 accounts worldwide receiving portions of the remaining stolen funds, which are now subject of the complaint, authorities said.
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