Ride the Lightning

IT Executive Rips Off Employer to the Tune of $6 Million

January 9, 2020

It's an old story, but with a big number attached. As Naked Security reported on January 7, IT exec Hicham Kabbaj is looking at paying his former employer restitution of $6,051,453 – he's also looking at a prison sentence of up to 20 years (he'll probably get less, but the sentencing is still pending).

2015 through 2019 were sweet years for an IT services and product company calling itself Interactive Systems. It submitted 52 invoices to a global internet business in Manhattan for a ton of stuff: 10 servers here, 16 servers there, 3 firewall devices, plus big setup fees for all of it.

Of those invoices, four of them were submitted as Microsoft Word documents. The metadata for all four of the Word docs pointed to the same author: Kabbaj.

He pleaded guilty to one count of wire fraud for having set up a shell company and billing his employer for firewalls and services that "Interactive Systems" never actually installed.

To make it all perfectly circular, Kabbaj even addressed the invoices to himself. Hard to believe he didn't get caught earlier!

Once Company-1 (the real company was not named) paid up, Kabbaj would move the cash to his own bank account – that netted him the $6 million. The last payment was in May 2019, after which investigators started talking to Kabbaj's colleagues.

One said he had never purchased the equipment or ordered the services identified in several invoices. Another said he had never seen Interactive Services Systems show up to do the services they billed for. To do so, a vendor would have had to get his approval, and he'd never even heard of a vendor called Interactive Systems.

When investigators checked with the manufacturers of the gear that Interactive Systems says it installed, they found out that the bogus company wasn't listed as an authorized dealer for their products. Nor did it ever file a tax return.

Kabbaj, 48, will also give back the goodies he bought with the loot: namely, one house in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, and one in Hewitt, New Jersey. Where he's going to get funds to pay the $6 million in restitution, who knows?

Kabbaj isn't the first IT boss gone bad, and he won't be the last. There really ought to be procedures in place to foil this sort of insider crime.

Please note that RTL will be on sabbatical next week and return on January 20.

Sharon D. Nelson, Esq., President, Sensei Enterprises, Inc.
3975 University Drive, Suite 225|Fairfax, VA 22030
Email: Phone: 703-359-0700
Digital Forensics/Cybersecurity/Information Technology
https://senseient.com
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