Thread by @mmnjug

On August 1 last year, employees at the finance department of the little-known Fairfax County, which forms part of the suburban ring of Washington, DC in the United States, received an email they believed to be from the headquarters of Dell Computers in Texas. - @dailynation

@dailynation Fairfax had a running multimillion-dollar computer supply deal for its schools in the county, and the email indicated it had been written by Accounts Payables department of Dell. It asked Fairfax to reroute its pending payments, which were almost due, to another account in Ohio.

@dailynation Fairfax County obliged, and from August 8 to September 10 sent a total of Sh134M to the new account using electronic transfers. In total, the county sent 28 payments ranging from as low as $328 (Sh32,800) to as high as $241,223 (Sh2.4 million).

@dailynation Unknown to the county, the money was being transferred almost immediately it hit the Ohio account to several other accounts worldwide before ending up thousands of kilometres away in the hustle and bustle of Nairobi.

@dailynation By September 10, when Fairfax County discovered it was being defrauded, some Kes52M had already been withdrawn in Nairobi.

@dailynation This discovery triggered a chain of investigations which were eventually taken over by the FBI, which was deployed to Nairobi. The global hunt for the suspects, code-named Operation reWired, was then widened to include a search for criminals in similar schemes.

@dailynation It eventually led to the arrest of 281 suspects from nine countries and was only made public last week by the FBI.

@dailynation The FBI sweep resulted in the seizure of nearly Kes384M and the disruption and recovery of approximately Kes12B in fraudulent wire transfers.

@dailynation The FBI has since 2013 gathered reports of more than Kes1T in losses from US victims alone. The worldwide tally is more than Kes2.6T

@dailynation BEC fraud is a new sophisticated type of cyber-enabled crime facilitated by the Internet where fraudsters use hacked email accounts to convince businesses or individuals to make payments that are either bogus or similar to actual payments owed to legitimate companies.

@dailynation As part of the scam, fraudsters learn about key personnel in companies who are responsible for payments as well as the protocols necessary to perform wire transfers in various companies and then target the businesses that regularly perform wire transfer payments.

@dailynation Interestingly, Kenya and Nigeria were the only African countries on the list of nations where FBI made arrests and recovered property bought by scammers after a year of investigations. Other countries in the list include Italy, Japan, Malasyia, United Kingdom, France and Turkey.

@dailynation The big puzzle for the FBI was how Kenya and Nigeria, two African countries with meagre computing skills and resources, had hacked their way into a list of major global cybercrime hotspots.

@dailynation But with its good Internet speeds, easy availability of cheap computers and a robust banking system driven by technology, it is not difficult to figure out why Kenya has bred such sophisticated criminals.

@dailynation ICYMI: So entrenched is the vice among Kenyan hackers that the US government now has a special unit whose role is to monitor cybercrime emanating from IP addresses in Kenya.

@dailynation .@USEmbassyKenya declined to give us the list of Kenyans who were arrested and extradited to the US to face charges or the assets repossessed during Operation Re-Wired.

@dailynation @USEmbassyKenya Documents filed by the US Department of Justice, however, indicate that three Kenyans, Robert Mutua Muli, Amil Hassan Raage, and Jeffrey Sila Ndungi, were arrested during the time of the operation.

@dailynation @USEmbassyKenya Between them, they had stolen Kes315.4M. About half of this money has not been recovered, according to court papers in the US. All three have been found guilty of their crimes after making plea bargain deals with the courts.

@dailynation @USEmbassyKenya Mr Muli is set to be sentenced next month, on October 4, Mr Raage will know his fate on October 11, while Mr Ndungi has already begun his 20-year sentence.

@dailynation @USEmbassyKenya Among the three it is Mr Muli, a 59-year-old Kenyan immigrant from Ohio, Texas, who had stolen the most; Kes212M, followed by Mr Raage, 48, who was picked by FBI detectives from Nairobi on May 9 this year with Kes94M in his bank accounts.

@dailynation @USEmbassyKenya Mr Ndungi, 33, who was in April last year sentenced to 20 years in prison, had only managed to steal Kes7.6M before FBI detectives lured him to fly to a trap in Dallas, Texas from Nairobi.

@dailynation @USEmbassyKenya He was arrested at the Los Angeles International Airport as the plane he had boarded sat on the tarmac waiting for clearance to fly to London, where he would have connected to Nairobi.

@dailynation @USEmbassyKenya Before the US theft, it appears that the 2010 University of Nairobi engineering graduate had not only honed his skills by hacking and selling DStv bouquets in Kenya and Nigeria from his house in South B, Nairobi, but also made tonnes of money while at it.

@dailynation @USEmbassyKenya So lucrative was this venture that by the age of 26, just two years after graduating, Mr Ndungi had bought two Cessna planes with the tail numbers 5Y-CCN and 5Y-CCO.

@dailynation @USEmbassyKenya In 2013 he leased one of the planes to Nairobi Flight Training Limited. Apart from that he also owned a top-of-the-range Escalade and a Range Rover Sport, which the US repossessed after he was arrested. He also had a house at Executive Suites Estate in South B.

@dailynation @USEmbassyKenya During his trial, it emerged that Mr Ndungi had filed fake tax return requests amounting to Kes11M using the names of a person who had died — Mrs Cynthia Short — by pretending she was still alive and based in Nairobi.

@dailynation @USEmbassyKenya As Mr Ndungi was being sent to prison to start his term, detectives had on their sights two other Kenyans, Mr Muli and Mr Raage, who had apparently tricked their victims to think they were receiving emails from Dell Computers.

@dailynation @USEmbassyKenya Apart from defrauding the Fairfax County government by tricking them that they were sending payments for computers to Dell, Mr Muli also conned Vermont County government of Kes1.3M and the Detroit County government of Kes79M

@dailynation @USEmbassyKenya In these deals, he tricked his victims by pretending to be other companies other than Dell Computers, but the mode of operation was similar to what he had used on Fairfax County.

@dailynation @USEmbassyKenya In papers filed before court, Mr Muli is said to have opened a business checking account at Wells Fargo Bank in the name of Rogram Home Improvement Ltd on February 22, 2018. In the application to open the account, he said he was the sole owner of Rogram.

@dailynation @USEmbassyKenya Between May and July 2018, The City of Detroit entered into a sales agreement with another firm named Aecom Great Lakes Limited to meet the sales needs of the city.

@dailynation @USEmbassyKenya On May 25, 2018, the City of Detroit made a $69,464 deposit to the new account, and on June 1 a second payment of $699,802 was made to the account.

@dailynation @USEmbassyKenya On May 25, which was the same day that $69,464 hit the fake account that the City of Detroit thought belonged to Aecom, $49,990 was transferred to Rogram Home Improvement.

@dailynation @USEmbassyKenya Then, 11 days later, on June 6, $74,527 and $39,990 were transferred to Mr Muli’s personal account, which was then wired to Kenya. Most of this cash was recovered, but the City of Detroit lost $130,154 in the scam.

@dailynation @USEmbassyKenya As he was busy defrauding the City of Detroit, Mr Muli was also engaged in a similar fraud targeting the State of Vermont, this time by faking he was yet again a Dell employee. Like Mr Ndungi before him, Mr Muli was arrested in Texas as he attempted to flee to Kenya.

@dailynation @USEmbassyKenya Mr Raage, however, managed to escape to Nairobi on September 22 last year after his bank accounts were frozen, but was arrested eight months later, on May 8, by the FBI. He was extradited to the US on May 23 to face justice.

@dailynation @USEmbassyKenya Before being smoked out, Mr Raage had defrauded the University of California, San Diego of Kes75 and Pennsylvania University of Kes12M by tricking them to make payments they believed were going to Dell Computers.

@dailynation @USEmbassyKenya So perplexed was the US Justice Department on the arrest of Mr Raage that Attorney Robert Brewer would later say that “modern criminals like Raage have ditched the ski mask and getaway vehicle and opted for a computer as their weapon of choice”.

@dailynation @USEmbassyKenya How 3 Kenyan scammers stole over Kes300m from US firms in one of the most brazen Kenyan cyber theft syndicates in recent history. bit.ly/2m7bc2o