Lithuanian Evaldas Rimasauskas pleads guilty to wire fraud related to fake invoices that tricked Facebook and Google employees into sending him over $100M
Context & Ripple Effects
This plea closes a case that opened with the March 2017 arrest of Evaldas Rimasauskas, when Fortune reported that Google and Facebook had been tricked by fake invoices into wiring over $100M — and that both companies had already recouped the funds. The guilty plea converts a two-year-old disclosure into a conviction on wire fraud charges.
It also lands inside a cluster of wire-fraud resolutions across the industry: an ex-Apple employee pleaded guilty to defrauding Apple of $17M+ via kickbacks, and former HeadSpin CEO Manish Lachwani pleaded guilty to wire and securities fraud over inflated revenue figures.
First-order effects
- Rimasauskas now moves from indictment toward sentencing, with the wire-fraud conviction covering the fake-invoice scheme against both Google and Facebook employees.
- Google and Facebook face no open loss on this matter — their earlier statement that they recouped the funds means the financial exposure was resolved before the plea.
Second-order effects
- The scheme's mechanics — invoices impersonating a legitimate vendor and cleared by employees inside two of the world's largest finance operations — put vendor-verification and payment-approval controls back on the audit agenda for large tech payables teams.
- Prosecutors' willingness to pursue cross-border invoice fraud to a guilty plea raises the cost calculus for similar schemes targeting US-headquartered companies.
Third-order effects
- Taken alongside the Apple kickback case and the HeadSpin revenue-fraud plea, the pattern points to wire-fraud statutes becoming the standard enforcement tool for financial misconduct inside and against tech firms — pushing multi-layer approval workflows from best practice into baseline compliance.
- If socially engineered payment fraud keeps scaling against big corporate treasury functions, expect external-audit and cyber-insurance scrutiny to treat vendor-payment authentication as a control worth testing, not just an IT policy.
The trend: Tech companies are learning that their largest fraud losses come not from code breaches but from human-approved payments, and prosecutors are answering with wire-fraud convictions.