The Department of Justice announced Wednesday that, pursuant to a court-ordered default judgment and final order of forfeiture entered today, it has secured the forfeiture of approximately $5,315,746.29 of proceeds of a business email compromise (BEC) scheme and property involved in the subsequent laundering of the proceeds.
The judgment is the result of a civil forfeiture complaint filed by the United States in June 2024 seeking the forfeiture of the funds.
As alleged in the complaint, in January 2023, a workers’ union based in Dorchester, Massachusetts, was defrauded out of $6.4 million after it received a spoofed email that appeared to be from its investment manager.
The email misled the workers’ union into transferring the funds to the wrong bank account, which was controlled by a third party.
After the workers’ union had sent the payment, the fraudulently obtained funds were transferred through several intermediary bank accounts, with some funds transferred, or attempted to be transferred, to a cryptocurrency exchange and various foreign bank accounts located in Hong Kong, China, Singapore, and Nigeria.
Investigators also traced the proceeds of the scheme to seven domestically held bank accounts, the contents of which were subsequently seized.
