Man Sent to Prison after Trying to Defraud a Financial Auditor
Darren Barr will serve 57 months in prison after conducting a business email compromise against a county auditor’s office. Photo credit: Lucas County Sheriff.
Business Email Compromise Scam
Starting in March 2018, Barr and his co-conspirators gathered information on vendors that were approved by the government and the employees who were responsible for paying them, according to the indictment. Barr and his co-conspirators focused on the Office of the Lucas County Auditor and found the information of specific employees working for those contractors.
Barr and his co-conspirators then created false email accounts that looked similar to those of the vendor employees, according to the indictment.
This type of scam is a business email compromise scam, as The Daily Muck covered in an Oct. 21 story about a man, Oludayo Kolawole John Adeagbo, 45, who sent false emails to two universities instructing the employees to change payment information they had for vendors they contracted.
As Adeagbo did, Barr and his co-conspirators used spoofed emails, which resemble legitimate business emails but are one letter, number or symbol from the original (e.g., Andy.Willson@info.com vs. Andy.Willlson@info.com), to infiltrate businesses by either having them reroute their payments, or having them click on and upload malware from a link or attachment in the email.
With the fraudulent, spoofed emails, Barr’s co-conspirators sent notifications to the Lucas Country Auditor with new payment instructions for work invoiced by the actual vendor.
Fake Corporate Checking Accounts
Barr and his co-conspirators used fake Internal Revenue Service corporate and State of Pennsylvania documents to open fraudulent corporate bank accounts at Bank of America, PNC Bank and Citizens Bank, according to the indictment. Then, they instructed the government employees to use the fraudulent bank information to make payments for legitimate invoices, essentially redirecting the funds to themselves.
The scheme was supposed to work in a way that the Lucas County Auditor would work with legitimate government-approved vendors, but when it was time to pay, the employees would use the fraudulent payment information given to them by Barr and his co-conspirators, according to the indictment.
The government employees, believing that the fake emails were authentic, followed the instructions on the false emails and sent money to bank accounts controlled by Barr and his co-conspirators for services actually completed by legitimate vendors, prosecutors say. To try to conceal the scheme, Barr and his co-conspirators dispersed the funds to separate accounts once the government employees paid into the fraudulent accounts. This made retrieving the money more difficult once the mistake was discovered.
Barr pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and was sentenced to 57 months, according to his judgment documents. He will also serve three years of supervised release and has been ordered to pay $622,793.62 in restitution.
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