ORLANDO, Fla. — A 34-year-old man remains jailed in Louisiana more than a year after being accused in an international phishing scheme that involved the Reedy Creek Improvement District, Walt Disney World’s governmental agency.
- 2 men jailed in Louisiana, accused in international phishing scam
- Investigators: Reedy Creek initially wired $814,000 payment
- Disney government recalled money, got all but $93,559 back
Disney’s Reedy Creek caught the sophisticated email phishing scam as it unfolded last year and managed to retrieve all but $93,559, according to an Orange County Sheriff’s Office report.
The agency turned over its findings to the FBI, which said the Reedy Creek theft was part of a larger “business email compromise” scam sweeping the country with coordinated attacks from Nigeria, Canada, and Poland.
Officers in Caddo Parish in Louisiana, the Caddo Parish seat of Shreveport, and the FBI teamed up to investigate the Reedy Creek theft, as well as another in California.
Patrick Babila, 34, and Thadius Pugh, 35, were arrested in connection to both cases in May 2018.
Babila remains jailed in the Caddo Correctional Center on three counts of illegal transmission of monetary funds on a combined $1.25 million bond. He’s not eligible for bond as an in-state and out-of-state fugitive.
Pugh was booked on two counts of illegal transmission of monetary funds.
Records show he is not jailed at Caddo Correctional Center.
Reedy Creek received an email advising it to send future vendor payments to a new bank account in Pugh’s name, the Caddo Parish Sheriff’s Office said. That agency said Reedy Creek wired $814,000, but after it realized the vendor’s email had been hacked, it recalled the wire transfer and got all but $93,559 returned.
An earlier report from the Orange County Sheriff’s Office gave a lower figure for the wire transfer: $721,873. Both agencies gave the same figure for the unrecovered amount of $93,559.
The Caddo Parish Sheriff’s Office also got a complaint from a Hermosa Beach, California, man was who talking with someone over email about investing in a company.
“The company’s email account was later hacked, and once the man decided to invest, he received instructions via the hacked account to wire his $50,000 investment to a Shreveport bank account in Pugh’s name,” the Caddo Parish Sheriff’s Office said in a statement.
In both cases, the business wire transfers were diverted to a Shreveport bank account after their emails were compromised.
Authorities said Pugh and Babila were tied to a nationwide scam targeted by Operation Wire Wire, headed by the U.S. Department of Justice and the FBI. Federal agents conducted a six-month investigation culminating in 74 arrests in the United States and overseas, including 29 in Nigeria, and three in Canada, Mauritius and Poland.
Authorities seized almost $2.4 million. It additionally is credited with the “disruption and recovery of approximately $14 million in fraudulent wire transfers,” the U.S. Department of Justice said in a June 2018 statement.
