Fraud Mastermind Executes $547,455 Business Email Scam, Duping Victims Into Sending Fraudulent Transfers: DOJ

A 54-year-old man from Ohio is facing nearly five years in prison for his involvement in an email spoofing scheme that scammed companies in the US. 

According to a statement from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Mississippi, Gabriel Waters was engaged in a wire fraud and money laundering scheme where criminals sent emails that imitated the corporate accounts of employees who control the finances of the victim companies.

The perpetrators bought domain names that look very similar to the legitimate domain names owned by businesses and used imitation email accounts to direct the victim companies’ employees, customers or partners to send money to a bank account that they controlled under the guise of a legitimate transaction.

Waters played a crucial role in the scheme, according to the DOJ.

He set up bank accounts in the US, received money directly from the victims and then laundered the funds to different accounts before eventually converting them to cryptocurrency to transfer to the email fraudsters overseas. 

US District Judge Sharion Aycock sentenced Waters to 57 months of imprisonment, which will be followed by five years of supervised release. She also ordered the payment of $547,455.80 in restitution to the victims.

An accountant and adjunct business instructor from Pennsylvania was also recently sentenced to federal prison for laundering $800,000 of proceeds from a similar scheme.

The victims received spoofed emails while in the process of making large wire and automatic clearinghouse (ACH) transfers, directing them to transfer the funds to bank accounts controlled by the fraudster.

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