The City of Fort Lauderdale almost lost $1.2 million in a phishing scam last year, but on Thursday, city leaders announced that they were able to get their money back.
It took months of complicated investigative work to recover the large sum of money. The Fort Lauderdale Police Department conducted the investigation with the assistance of The U.S. Secret Service, the FBI, the Mariposa County Sheriff’s Office and the Mariposa County District Attorney’s Office in California, the Avondale Police Department in Arizona, and the Lee’s Summit Police Department in Missouri.
The phishing scam was discovered last September when the city paid what they thought was a legitimate bill to Moss Construction.
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“On September 14th, FLPD was notified by the City of Fort Lauderdale’s Finance Department after one of their employees received an email that appeared to be from Moss Construction. Moss Construction is the company that is constructing our new police headquarters,” said Chief William Schultz with the Fort Lauderdale Police Department.
According to investigators, this was part of a sophisticated nationwide construction fraud scheme. In the specific case involving the city, the scammer sent an email with an invoice posing as the construction company.
“There’s a whole series of documentation and forms and things that have to be provided to the city in order for us to recognize it as a valid payment request and this particular perpetrator had all of that,” said Fort Lauderdale Mayor Dean Trantalis.
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After the city employee paid the invoice, the money was then sent via wire transfer to the bank accounts of other innocent victims who were involved in fake online romantic relationships with the scammers. The victims were coerced into setting up the accounts and did not know they were part of the fraud scheme.
Fortunately the receiving bank immediately flagged it as fraud and detectives stopped it just in time before the money went to Chinese banks or cryptocurrency.
“They located them fairly quick, they froze the funds and then were able to retrieve them back,” said Chief Schultz.
“What happened to the city, we clearly have reviewed our protocols and we hope this will never happen again, but anyone can be a victim because the internet is certainly a playground for a lot of mischievous things,” said Mayor Trantalis.
Moss Construction had the following statement regarding this case:
“We are happy to hear that the City of Fort Lauderdale has recovered the money from this attempted fraud. Moss had nothing to do with the scam. Our systems were never compromised, and our information remained safe and secure. We fully cooperated with the city and law enforcement authorities to help them get to the bottom of the case. The facts are clear: bad actors used our good reputation and standard public information found on a basic internet search to try and cause harm.”
The investigation into this phishing scheme is ongoing as detectives are still trying to find the people responsible for the crime.
