What happened
The Indian arm of Italian engineering group Tecnimont SpA transferred approximately $18.6 million in three installments to Hong Kong bank accounts in late 2018 after a fraud ring impersonated the group's chief executive. The attackers emailed from a lookalike address and staged conference calls in which people posed as the CEO, other senior executives and a Swiss lawyer, discussing a confidential acquisition in China. The company launched a forensic investigation and dismissed its India head and finance chief.
How the deception worked
This scheme layered voice over email to defeat skepticism. Messages arrived from a domain closely resembling the group CEO's, describing a secret acquisition in China that had to be funded from India because regulatory constraints supposedly blocked transfers from Italy. To answer the obvious objection, the fraudsters convened conference calls in which multiple actors played the CEO, group executives and an external Swiss attorney, giving the transaction the texture of a real deal team. Secrecy was justified as regulatory sensitivity, which kept the India head from calling headquarters. Three tranches were wired to Hong Kong before the parent company discovered the deception.
AI involvement · No AI reported
Impersonation on the conference calls was performed by live human actors; no synthetic voice was reported.
The control that would have caught it· our reading, not a claim from the sources
Verification must go through a channel the attacker does not control: a callback to headquarters' known switchboard would have collapsed the entire fake deal team.
Sources (2)
- Chinese group swindles $18.5 million from Indian arm of Italian companyThe Economic Times via MarketScreener·in.marketscreener.comOpen ↗
- BEC Scam Leads to Theft of $18.6 MillionBankInfoSecurity·bankinfosecurity.comOpen ↗
This entry summarises public reporting. It is not a legal finding, and details can change as investigations conclude. Found an error? Send a correction.