US Court Sentenced Cyber criminal to 11 Year jail and $30 Million in Restitution

Ghaleb Alaumary, 36, of Mississauga, Ontario, was sentenced after pleading guilty to two counts of conspiracy to commit money laundering. As part of his sentence, Alaumary is also required to pay more than $30 million in restitution to victims and serve three years of supervised release after completion of his prison sentence.

“This defendant served as an integral conduit in a network of cyber criminals who siphoned tens of millions of dollars from multiple entities and institutions across the globe,” said Acting U.S. Attorney David H. Estes for the Southern District of Georgia. “He laundered money for a rogue nation and some of the world’s worst cyber criminals, and he managed a team of co-conspirators who helped to line the pockets and digital wallets of thieves. But U.S. law enforcement, working in conjunction with its partners throughout the world, will bring to justice fraudsters who think they can hide behind a computer screen.”

According to court documents, Alaumary and his co-conspirators used business email compromise schemes, ATM cash-outs and bank cyber-heists to steal money from victims and then launder the money through bank accounts and digital currency. He previously pleaded guilty in the Southern District of Georgia in two money laundering cases.

Alaumary conspired with others who sent fraudulent “spoofed” emails to a university in Canada in 2017 to make it appear the emails were from a construction company requesting payment for a major building project. The university, believing it was paying the construction company, wired $11.8 million CAD (approximately $9.4 million USD) to a bank account controlled by Alaumary and his co-conspirators. Alaumary then arranged with individuals in the United States and elsewhere to launder the stolen funds through various financial institutions.

In the second case, which was transferred to the Southern District of Georgia from the Central District of California for his guilty plea and sentencing, Alaumary recruited and organized individuals to withdraw stolen cash from ATMs; he provided bank accounts that received funds from bank cyber-heists and fraud schemes; and, once the ill-gotten funds were in accounts he controlled, Alaumary further laundered the funds through wire transfers, cash withdrawals, and by exchanging the funds for cryptocurrency. The funds included those from a 2019 North Korean-perpetrated cyber-heist of a Maltese bank. Other victims of Alaumary’s crimes included banks headquartered in India, Pakistan and Malta, as well as companies in the United States and U.K., individuals in the United States and a professional soccer club in the U.K.

The case was investigated by the U.S. Secret Service and supported the FBI and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. It was a complex case and evidences were spread all over the world. The successful conviction not only proved high quality of the investigation but also possibility of bringing such criminal to justice.

Source: Department of Justice (The United States)