A scam has lead to thousands of laptops being stolen from a South Florida business
A Fort Lauderdale business has been the latest target for a sophisticated scam involving Laptop computers. The story plays out like the scenes of a Hollywood movie.
Jake Luthers company provides, and supplies a bit of everything to much larger companies. Everything from toilet paper to electronics. If your company needs it, Jake can supply it.
When a company from Washington DC with a .gov email address emailed Jake he was obviously happy as to the new business opportunity. Everything looked totally legit. Someone impersonating Rodney Cartwright, the senior procurement executive at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.
“It was from a dot-gov email address. From there it says, ‘We’d like you to bid on the opportunity to supply us with laptops for a new office expansion.’ We looked him up, we looked up the address, we looked up the National Gallery of Art. Everything lined up.”
Jake Luther
Jake immediately worked up a bid to compete for the business, which in this case was laptops that were needed at a final bid price of $97,900 total, which included 63 laptops. A few days passed when he received an email back letting him know that the bid had been approved.
Jake ordered the laptops to ship before payment as this was typical for larger companies to pay a 30 days net. It was a different address, however the scammer told Jake this was the distribution warehouse for the museum. When the wire still had not arrived 30 days later, Jake began getting concerned.
He ended up tracking down the real Rodney Cartwright, and quickly learned someone was impersonating him, and he had been scammed.
The email address was spoofed so it’s nearly impossible to track it down, the laptops were picked up by a guy named Kelvin at the warehouse, he claimed that he was a logistic expert for a different company. That company has since been contacted and has never employed a Kelvin.
