Security News > 2023 > September > Nigerian man pleads guilty to attempted $6 million BEC email heist
Kosi Goodness Simon-Ebo, a 29-year-old Nigerian national extradited from Canada to the United States last April, pleaded guilty to wire fraud and money laundering through business email compromise.
According to the plea agreement, the scammers had a high success ratio of roughly 1 to 7, making one million out of the almost seven million they attempted to steal.
The BEC scammer will also have to pay restitution of $1,072,306, equating to the total amount of losses suffered by the victims.
Business email compromise is a high-impact, multi-billion-dollar problem that threatens companies and organizations worldwide.
Verizon reported in June 2023 that BEC attacks have almost doubled this year, and they typically start with an email from a legitimate, compromised address.
A report from Microsoft warned about the speed of BEC attacks, explaining that the entire process between compromising email credentials, registering typo-squatting domains, and hijacking existing email threats only takes a couple of hours.