These Scams Are Not Hypothetical.
They Happened. To Real People.

Brian Oliver received an email claiming PayPal owed him $450. He called the phone number in the email. The scammer walked him through a fake "typo" that appeared to deposit $10,000 into his Bank of America account — except the bank website he was looking at was a mirrored fake. Over the next three days, Oliver fed $10,000 in cash into a crypto ATM and handed $198,560 in gold coins to a courier driving a black Mustang. The password at the door was "blue."

Gainesville Police set up a sting operation. One courier, Seth Wayne, received 18 years in federal prison. A second courier, Atharva Shailesh Sathawane, was convicted of conspiracy and money laundering tied to over 30 transactions and nearly $8 million stolen from elderly victims.

Lynette and Scott had been corresponding with their mortgage broker for weeks. One email came through that looked identical to every one before it — except the sender's domain had two V's instead of a W. Instead of escrow.com, the email came from escrovv.com. They wired their down payment. Their broker never received it.

Orange County Sheriff investigators traced the funds. After several months, the couple recovered about 90% of their money. The remaining 10% had already been converted to Bitcoin and was unrecoverable. In most cases like this, victims recover nothing.

FACC — an Austrian aerospace manufacturer that makes parts for Boeing, Airbus, and Rolls-Royce — received a fraudulent email impersonating its CEO, Walter Stephan. The email instructed an employee in the finance department to wire roughly €50 million to fund a "confidential acquisition." The employee complied. By the time FACC realized what had happened, the money had moved through banks in Slovakia and Asia.

FACC recovered about €10.9 million but took a €41.9 million loss. The company posted a pretax loss of €23.4 million for the fiscal year. The supervisory board fired CEO Walter Stephan and CFO Minfen Gu for "severely violating their duties" in what FACC dubbed the "Fake President Incident." The finance employee who executed the transfer was also dismissed.

Evaldas Rimasauskas registered a company in Latvia with a name nearly identical to Quanta Computer — a legitimate Taiwan-based hardware manufacturer that did real business with Facebook and Google. Over two years, he sent fraudulent invoices with spoofed email addresses, along with forged contracts and fake corporate seals. Employees at both tech giants wired payments to bank accounts he controlled in Latvia, Cyprus, Hungary, and Hong Kong.

Facebook wired nearly $100 million. Google wired over $23 million. Rimasauskas was extradited from Lithuania, pleaded guilty to wire fraud, and was sentenced to five years in federal prison. He was ordered to forfeit $49.7 million and pay $26.5 million in restitution.

Animashaun Adebo, known as "Kazeem," ran a multi-year scheme targeting individuals in real estate transactions and small businesses across the United States. Victims received emails that appeared to come from legitimate parties in their transactions — mortgage brokers, title companies, vendors. The fraudulent email addresses closely resembled the real ones, differing by a single character. Victims wired funds. Adebo laundered the proceeds through shell companies in the US and abroad.

Adebo pleaded guilty to wire fraud conspiracy in federal court in Brooklyn on April 20, 2026. A co-defendant, Idowu Ademoroti, was previously convicted. A third defendant, Nelson Ojeriakhi, was extradited from Paris and pleaded guilty in November 2025. A fourth remains at large. Total reported losses exceed $50 million.

Jenna Carlson had saved for years to buy her first home. She was putting 20% down — $42,000. She had exchanged 16 emails with her real estate attorney's paralegal, asking clarifying questions before the wire. One of those emails contained the wiring instructions. She went to the bank and sent the money. The next day, the real paralegal called asking about the down payment. Carlson said she'd already wired it. The paralegal replied: "What email? I didn't send any email." The sender's address was nearly identical to the paralegal's — just two extra letters added.

Chase Bank was able to stop $9,000 of the wire. The other $33,000 was gone. "It was fraud and I'd been scammed," Carlson said. "Everything I'd saved was gone in the blink of an eye. And I couldn't do anything about it." She went through months of therapy to cope with the loss. FBI Special Agent Siobhan Johnson, quoted in the ABC7 story, said real estate wire fraud is one of the fastest-growing cyber scams in the country.