Thanks to international collaboration between the Italian police and the US Secret Service, those responsible for a million-dollar fraud involving an Italian and an American company have been identified.
The investigation activities were started after a report from the first company that in recent years was following an important project with the Americans relating to the supply of travertine products for the renovation of a temple in New York, for a total value of approximately 1.4 million dollars.
The US company had paid approximately 50% of the total value of the project (700 thousand dollars) into what it thought was the bank account of the Italian company. In reality, they had been the subject of a BEC (Business Email Compromise) attack, a type in which skilled cybercriminals manage to take possession of the email account of the targeted company, from which they then learn information and become aware of all the financial transactions, and replace the payment destination IBANs.
In practice, the American company had been induced to make the payment by an email received which apparently came from the Italian partner's email account. Once the report was raised, the Postal Police contacted the Rome office of the United States Secret Service (USSS), a US federal agency, and investigations began. The USSS managed to interrogate the money mule, the recipient of the stolen funds and who assisted the transnational fraudsters: he declared that he had already distributed the majority of the stolen funds through other accounts, as ordered by the perpetrators of the scam. The USSS, however, was able to recover some illicitly obtained funds along with several electronic devices intended for the subjects.
(Unioneonline/ss)