Jone The 25th was a happy day for the city of Fort Lauderdale, Florida, as Mayor Dean Trentalis and Police Chief William Schultz announced at a press conference the recovery of an electronic payment of 1, $16 million intended for Moss Construction that had been stolen in September through an email phishing scam.
The FBI, the US Secret Service and the city police had been working on the investigation of the embezzled money, which was a payment for work on a $100 million police headquarters, a three-story building.
And unlike another recent construction payment stolen via an email phishing scheme, last month’s theft of a $735,000 payment for a warehouse in Minnesota—this investigation began shortly after the funds were diverted.
“The incident,” according to a statement from the US Secret Service, took place on Thursday, September 14, 2023. Six days later the city had announced the theft.
Instead, the Minnesota phishing theft went undetected for a month, according to court documents in lawsuits and garnishments stemming from that missed payment.
If more weeks had passed, the money may never have been recovered because the Florida heist, carried out by an international criminal gang, was trying to move the funds out of the accounts where they had been temporarily parked. All three accounts belonged to other victims of the crime ring who had been tricked into opening them as part of email romance schemes.
According to a chart produced by city officials, investigators recovered the funds as they moved through checks from the first account, to which the contractor’s payment was mistakenly sent via a personal check for $491,000 and a cashier’s check for $550,000. dollars
City officials showed how funds from the three-story fishing scam were recovered from police headquarters.
Screenshot: WTVJ-Ft. Lauderdale
“They tracked them down pretty quickly, froze the funds and then were able to get them back” before moving them into cryptocurrency or an overseas bank account, Schultz said at a briefing.
The cyber crooks had collected the necessary forms and steps needed for Fort Lauderdale to release the progress payments. “They had everything,” Trentalis said.
After an employee of the city’s Treasury Department transferred the funds on Sept. 14, the finance department notified the police department’s financial crimes detectives, who “immediately began trying to locate the money,” city police said in a statement issued in January.
No arrests have been made and the exact identities of those who tried to steal the nearly $1.2 million payment are unknown.
Fort Lauderdale-based Moss Construction said in a statement issued in January that “the company’s systems were never compromised and our information remained secure.
“The facts are clear: bad actors used our good reputation and standard public information found in a basic Internet search to try to cause harm,” the statement said.
As phishing thefts of construction payments have become a problem, some contracts now include fraudulent transfer of funds clauses. Clauses may include required security measures, notification rules and allocation of liability for lost funds. The US Secret Service advises calling a known point of contact instead of changing bank information via email, sending an email directly to a known email address instead of replying to a thread, and checking the name of the email domain.
In general, other security experts advise extreme caution if an email, no matter how convincing, asks to change the form or account to which a payment should be sent.
