By Juan Montoya
By now several scenarios are developing toward explaining how a $1.3 million in payments from the Brownsville Public Utility Board to Rene Capistran's Noble Texas Builders was diverted to an account in another bank and apparently disappeared.
One is that the PUB was victim of phishing, that is that a cyberthief somehow was able to acquire the bank's, PUB's, and/or Noble Builder's bank numbers or passwords and trick PUB or Noble to make the transfers to a Bank of America account instead of to the construction firm's Lone Star National Bank account.
Capsitran is a director at Lone Star National Bank.
In Scenario 1, it would mean that both banks, PUB and Noble Builders' firewalls and defenses had been breached and that the phishing thieves could strike at will in the future with other accounts.
Scenario 2 is somewhat more sanguine.
In this one, it entails someone inside Noble Builders and a confederate at the PUB. The conspirator at Noble would send his confederate at PUB accounts payable or administration a simple email from Noble saying they had switched bank accounts and instead of sending payments to Lone Star to send it to a Bank of America account.
The accomplice at PUB would then make the changes and the payments to the firm would be directed to the new Bank of America account, wire the amount to an offshore account and the money would be gone.
Or, there is still another possible scenario. The payments to Noble were made by PUB. Someone at Noble transferred the cash to Bank of America, and the money is again wired out of the country.
In scenario one and three PUB is off the hook. But it's scenario 2 that seems the most likely possibility, according to some seasoned investigators. Therein lies the rob.
They say that a more mundane possibility is that someone either at Noble or PUB knew that large payments would be made to the construction firm and conspired to divert the funds to the other account.
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Noble won the bid to construct the new PUB Administrative Annex Building, designed by ERO Architects. The new building is located adjacent to the existing Brownsville PUB Administration Building at Robinhood Drive and is the largest part of a $16.8 million building project started in January 2019.
The blue-ribbon cutting was to be held March 23, but was suspended due to the COVID-19 restrictions on large crowds and social distancing.
A former PUB board member said that regardless of where the fault lies and which scenario is the most likely, the PUB rate payers should not foot the bill for the heist.
"The people - especially the residential customers - should not foot the bill for this," he said. "This sounds more like an inside job than a cybercrime. We shouldn't have to pay for this. The administration should be held accountable for the apparent lack of safeguards in place for the handling of payments. Where are the security oversights that are supposed to be in place to prevent things like this?"
By now several scenarios are developing toward explaining how a $1.3 million in payments from the Brownsville Public Utility Board to Rene Capistran's Noble Texas Builders was diverted to an account in another bank and apparently disappeared.
One is that the PUB was victim of phishing, that is that a cyberthief somehow was able to acquire the bank's, PUB's, and/or Noble Builder's bank numbers or passwords and trick PUB or Noble to make the transfers to a Bank of America account instead of to the construction firm's Lone Star National Bank account.
Capsitran is a director at Lone Star National Bank.
In Scenario 1, it would mean that both banks, PUB and Noble Builders' firewalls and defenses had been breached and that the phishing thieves could strike at will in the future with other accounts.
Scenario 2 is somewhat more sanguine.
In this one, it entails someone inside Noble Builders and a confederate at the PUB. The conspirator at Noble would send his confederate at PUB accounts payable or administration a simple email from Noble saying they had switched bank accounts and instead of sending payments to Lone Star to send it to a Bank of America account.
The accomplice at PUB would then make the changes and the payments to the firm would be directed to the new Bank of America account, wire the amount to an offshore account and the money would be gone.
Or, there is still another possible scenario. The payments to Noble were made by PUB. Someone at Noble transferred the cash to Bank of America, and the money is again wired out of the country.
In scenario one and three PUB is off the hook. But it's scenario 2 that seems the most likely possibility, according to some seasoned investigators. Therein lies the rob.
They say that a more mundane possibility is that someone either at Noble or PUB knew that large payments would be made to the construction firm and conspired to divert the funds to the other account.
Noble won the bid to construct the new PUB Administrative Annex Building, designed by ERO Architects. The new building is located adjacent to the existing Brownsville PUB Administration Building at Robinhood Drive and is the largest part of a $16.8 million building project started in January 2019.
The blue-ribbon cutting was to be held March 23, but was suspended due to the COVID-19 restrictions on large crowds and social distancing.
A former PUB board member said that regardless of where the fault lies and which scenario is the most likely, the PUB rate payers should not foot the bill for the heist.
"The people - especially the residential customers - should not foot the bill for this," he said. "This sounds more like an inside job than a cybercrime. We shouldn't have to pay for this. The administration should be held accountable for the apparent lack of safeguards in place for the handling of payments. Where are the security oversights that are supposed to be in place to prevent things like this?"