Google and Facebook lost $122Mn to fake invoices 🤯
Google and Facebook are two of the world’s largest corporations, employing some of the brightest minds on the globe. Given their size and diversity of employees, one would expect big organizations never to be taken in by people or other businesses. But, as it turns out, that is not the case.
Evaldas Rimasauskas, a Lithuanian, scammed Google out of $23 million and Facebook out of $99 million for items these businesses never acquired between 2013 and 2015. Scammed two IT giants? Really? Turns out, yes!
But how did he pull it off? Well, that’s a tale worth telling.
Rimasauskas presented himself to be a Taiwanese hardware manufacturer, Quanta Computer, which has a Latvian firm with the same name. He then issued invoices to the two tech corporations, Facebook and Google, for the items he never sold. According to the investigation, these forged invoices were supported by contracts and letters spoof signed by executives from the two companies. In addition, he attached forged emails sent by Google and Facebook leaders.
Surprisingly, both businesses paid up. Due to the high amount of money involved, both Google and Facebook used wire transfers to send funds. With such extensive documentation, no one from either company checked to verify if the invoices and contracts were legitimate, which is how the blunder occurred.
It was later that Google discovered the fraud and informed the relevant authorities and that’s how Rimasauskas was arrested.
Sigh! That’s unimaginable. Two tech giants getting scammed for millions of dollars for over 2 years. While it’s all done but it’s important to take a harder look at how did this happen and how could it have been avoided.
Well, having a tool in place that helps organizations detect fake invoices, either where the charges do not match or the most notorious one, where the images or digits are fraudulent is crucial. And that is exactly where the Intelligent Document Processing system comes in handy.
Superior IDP systems help organizations detect such invoice frauds. And well, save millions and first-hand embarrassment.
