The multi-millionaire founder of Twynam Agricultural Group Pty Ltd. lost $1 million in an email fraud, a London court heard Thursday. The British man who facilitated the theft says he’s a victim too.
John Kahlbetzer, who is on the Forbes list of the 50 richest Australians, lost the money when fraudsters tricked the administrator of his personal finances into transferring it to them, his court papers say.
Fraudsters emailed Christine Campbell, pretending to be the 87-year-old and asking her to pay $1 million to an account held by a British man, David Aldridge, which she did. Kahlbetzer is suing Aldridge to recover the funds, but Aldridge says he was being “unwittingly used” and was himself the victim of a fraud involving a woman he met online and believed he was in a loving relationship with.
Email frauds where companies’ staff are tricked into transferring money are a growing problem. U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation statistics show “business email compromise” cases, where criminals ask company officials to transfer funds, have cost more than $3 billion since 2015. That type of scam “continues to grow, evolve and target businesses of all sizes,” the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center says on its website.
Aldridge’s lawyer, Nicholas Towers, and Kahlbetzer’s attorney, William Buck, declined to comment. The case settled Friday morning, according to the court.
Romance scams
Lawyers for Kahlbetzer, who has a net worth of $950 million according to data compiled by Forbes this year, say Aldridge “actively facilitated the payment of the sum to his account.” He then transferred 61,538 pounds ($82,600) to another of his accounts and used some of it to settle his tax bills. He transferred most of the money to accounts in countries including the U.S., Hong Kong, the U.K., the United Arab Emirates, Ghana and Nigeria.
Aldridge said he was sending the money on the request of his girlfriend, Nancy Jones, who told him it was being used to pay death duties on her parents’ estate “so that he could jointly benefit from her inheritance and the two of them could live together,” Kahlbetzer’s court papers say. They say he’s never met Jones and hasn’t provided any proof of her existence.
Aldridge’s court papers say he “is also a victim of the fraudsters, who have tricked him” into letting his account be used to defraud Kahlbetzer. The evidence doesn’t show that he knew he was assisting a fraudster, they say, and he “had no idea” that a fraud was being committed against Kahlbetzer. Continued at Bloomberg:
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