search
Donate

News

The city of Athens files a lawsuit to reclaim funds stolen in a cyber crime

By:
Posted on:

< < Back to

ATHENS, Ohio (WOUB) — The city of Athens is suing unknown cyber criminals who scammed it out of close to three-quarters of a million dollars.

Athens City Hall is seen in Athens, Ohio, on Tuesday, June 22, 2021. [Joseph Scheller | WOUB]
Athens City Hall is seen in Athens, Ohio, on Tuesday, June 22, 2021. [Joseph Scheller | WOUB]
The lawsuit filed Wednesday afternoon says last month the city received by email what appeared to be a valid invoice from Pepper Construction, which built the new fire station and is remodeling the Armory building.

The invoice was for $721,976 and included instructions for depositing the funds into a bank account. The city did not discover until after the transfer was made two weeks ago that the invoice was fraudulent.

The lawsuit says the emailed invoice originated from a domain created by the scammers that is almost identical to the Pepper Construction’s domain. The word construction has the u and the c transposed, so it read pepperconstrcution.com.

The city is asking the court to quickly freeze the bank account while it tries to figure out who the scammers are and track down any money they may already have transferred out of the account.