SEYMOUR – With no leads left to follow, Seymour Police Chief John Bucherati said the case involving a cyber scam that bilked the town out of $375,000 last year is closed.
While Bucherati said police were able to recover $182,000 of the stolen money, the likelihood of recovering the remaining $193,000 is slim to none.
“We’ve kind a hit a dead end with leads, and we’re still out the $193,000,” Bucherati told the Valley Indy during an interview last week. “We were able to recover some of the fraudulent funds that our detectives traced to a Bank of America, and we are in the process of getting that money back. We did make an arrest and that case is being prosecuted in Milford Superior Court and that person is awaiting trial.”
Bucherati said detectives did a good job on a tough case.
“It’s not really normal to find somebody who’s directly tied to a scam like this, this was a phishing scam; these scams are very common but it’s often not normal to make an arrest in these cases,” Bucherati said. “We were lucky, and our detective bureau did a great job with their investigation in order to track this suspect down.”
Seymour Police back in February traveled to Maryland to pick up Charles Ukasanya, 48, on an arrest warrant. He is the suspect charged with stealing the town’s money through an email phishing scheme. Bucherati said Ukasanya was charged with first-degree larceny and is currently awaiting trial. He’s pleaded not guilty and his next court date is Aug. 9. Click here for a previous Valley Indy story detailing the arrest warrant that started the court process against the suspect.
Police believe Ukasanya is connected to a larger, international and infamous cyberscam that swindled public funds. The scam started with an email phishing scheme that victimized a Seymour Board of Education employee, giving the scammer the ability to generate fake requests for money transfers that looked real.
Regarding the remaining stolen funds, police were able to trace them to a cryptocurrency account associated with a now-defunct bank in San Diego. The crypto account, with an address in Hong Kong and associated with FTX trading, has also since gone belly up. An international criminal and founder of the failed cryptocurrency exchange FTX — Samuel Bankman Fried — was arrested in the Bahamas last December by the U.S. government, according to Bucherati.
The New York Times reported Bankman-Fried was arrested on various major fraud charges.
“The remaining amount of stolen funds is likely tied to an account owned by Samuel Bankman Fried, who was arrested in the Bahamas for a long string of fraud, and we believe that’s where the money may be, but we’ve hit some dead ends with that,” Bucherati said. “We don’t really have a way to trace it, especially because it’s international.”
Bucherati said no public officials or employees were involved in the crime.
Drugonis declined to say whether any employees faced disciplinary action for falling for the scam, but the town did add $50,000 to this year’s budget to protect the public’s money.
The arrest warrant used to charge Ukasanya noted that the school district’s finance office didn’t look closely at an email that requested a wire transfer because such transfers were the town’s responsibility. The warrant also noted that school business director told police the town’s finance director had the authority to make wire transfers without a second person present or a second person authorizing the transaction.
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