Google and Facebook duped in huge scam worth $100M

A report in March had it that a Lithuanian man had been charged over an email phishing attack against "two US-based internet companies" that were not named at the time but a new report by Fortune has now revealed the two companies were Facebook and Google.

They had allegedly been tricked into paying more than $100m to the alleged scammer's bank accounts.

The scammer, Evaldas Rimasauskas, 48, allegedly posed as an Asia-based manufacturer and deceived the companies from at least 2013 until 2015.

"Fraudulent phishing emails were sent to employees and agents of the victim companies, which regularly conducted multimillion-dollar transactions with [the Asian] company," the US Department of Justice (DOJ) said in March.

These emails purported to be from employees of the Asia-based firm, the DOJ alleged, and were sent from email accounts designed to look like they had come from the company, but in fact had not.

The DOJ also accused Mr Rimasauskas of forging invoices, contracts and letters "that falsely appeared to have been executed and signed by executives and agents of the victim companies".

"We detected this fraud against our vendor management team and promptly alerted the authorities," a spokeswoman for Google said in a statement.

"We recouped the funds and we're pleased this matter is resolved." 

Both firms did not however disclose how much money it had transferred and recouped. 

"Facebook recovered the bulk of the funds shortly after the incident and has been cooperating with law enforcement in its investigation,"  said Facebook spokeswoman.