A man tricked Google and Facebook into paying him $122 million by creating fake invoices.
The Lithuanian man has agreed to return $50 million of the total stolen amount, and he is scheduled to appear in court on July 29.
Google and Facebook are among the largest corporate organizations in the world, with some of the most brilliant minds on the planet working for them. Given their size and the multitude of people working for them, one might expect that these organizations would never be fooled or duped by individuals or other companies. However, it turns out that this is not the case, as a man based in Lithuania has managed to deceive the two tech giants into giving up a combined total of $122 million.
According to a report by Boing Boing, a Lithuanian man named Evaldas Rimasauskas defrauded Google, tricking the company into giving up $23 million, and also managed to scam Facebook into giving up $99 million for items these companies never purchased between 2013 and 2015.
How he pull off such a feat is a tale worth telling. Apparently, Rimasauskas pretended to be a Taiwanese harware maker, Quanta Computer, that had a company registered with the same name in Latvia. He then sent the two tech companies, Facebook and Google, invoice for the item he never sold. These fake invoices, as per the report, were accompanied by contracts and letters that appeared to have been signed by executives from the two companies. Additionally, he attatched spoofed emails that seemed to have been sent by executives from Google and Facebook.
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