Invoice paid in the "wrong" current account, entrepreneur at trial

It is still unclear whether behind this story there is even a hand of a mole in a sort of espionage affair which, however, does not have the object of stealing industrial secrets but much more simply of 34 thousand euros of an invoice paid in the current account " mistaken". Certainly there is only one process for receiving stolen goods from a 43-year-old resident of Treviso but originally from Venice, on the dock with the charge of receiving stolen goods. In fact, his current software company was in charge of his software company, on which a Filipino company made the payment of the amount due in relation to an invoice issued by an industry in Latina (the "Mechanotools srl"), which produces iron pipes.

The fact that the money ended up in another account would not have been a mistake: in January 2017 in fact to the accounting of the foreign company an email arrived, probably the result of pishing, in which it was given indication to make the payment using an iban different from the one that had always been used in the past. Far beyond the expiry of the invoice, the Latina company sent a reminder, obtaining as a response the copy of the apparently authentic email, in which the new dispositions for the balance were given..

The entrepreneurs themselves "cheated" to find out who that account was, going back to the entrepreneur of Treviso to which, following the investigation conducted by the postal police, the operations in the bank were blocked, collections included. But not all: 4 thousand euros of that payment mysteriously landed on the wrong account number had already been taken. For which the complaint was received for receiving stolen goods. "I didn't know anything about that payment, the accounting for the movements of the current account arrived to me after the block and I don't use home banking": the 43-year-old defended himself. A survey carried out on the computer equipment seized in the offices of the alleged fraudster confirmed that there are no traces that the offending email started from those terminals. The only strong point is that the server that handled electronic correspondence is in Texas, in the United States. But how would the owner of the software house, who has no relationship with the Latina company, have known about the payment? For the investigators he would have had a mole in the offices of the company in Lazio, which would have informed him about the expiry and amount.

For the prosecutor Massimo de Bortoli, the magistrate who conducted the investigations, it is difficult to imagine that the phishing beneficiary was someone who is not the author of the online scam. "There is no proof that my client is the person responsible for the deception," replies the lawyer, lawyer Laura Mattucci. This morning the hearing opened, immediately postponed to 7 May.