(Bloomberg) -- A Lithuanian alleged to have tricked Facebook Inc. and Alphabet Inc.'s Google into sending him more than $100 million is in talks to plead guilty to related charges, U.S. prosecutors said in a court filing.
Evaldas Rimasauskas is accused of posing as an Asian computer hardware manufacturer and sending phishing emails to employees with phony invoices, according to an indictment accusing him of wire fraud, identity theft and money laundering. He was arrested in March and extradited to New York in August.
In a Jan. 24 letter to U.S. District Judge George Daniels, prosecutors asked to postpone a status conference scheduled for Wednesday and to replace it with a change-of-plea hearing while the parties finalize talks. Daniels on Monday rescheduled the conference for Feb. 6.
Paul D. Petrus Jr., an attorney representing Rimasauskas, didn't immediately return a telephone message seeking comment.
Prosecutors said Rimasauskas set up bank accounts in Latvia and Cyprus that received payments from Google and Facebook and then forwarded that money to other accounts in Latvia, Cyprus, Slovakia, Lithuania, Hungary and Hong Kong.
More: Lithuanian Sent to U.S. for Cybertheft of Google, Facebook
The case is U.S. v. Rimasauskas, 16-cr-841, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York (Manhattan).
To contact the reporter on this story: Chris Dolmetsch in Federal Court in Manhattan at cdolmetsch@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: David Glovin at dglovin@bloomberg.net, Peter Jeffrey
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